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The Tell Tale Heart Trust Essay

876 Words4 Pages

It is hard to be sure if you can trust a character from a story. Edgar Allan Poe had this in mind when he wrote his stories. One of Poe's works, "The Tell-Tale Heart", can really make someone question their trust for the narrator. Moreover one can argue that the narrator is worthy of their trust, however after taking a closer look at the text, one will think the opposite. The reader cannot trust the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" to accurately portray events in the short story. This is because the narrator in this short story is egoistic, self-centered, and obstinate. The reader cannot trust the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" because he is egoistic. To demonstrate, in the text the narrator says, "[y]ou should have seen how wisely I proceeded" …show more content…

For instance, he says, "[t]hey heard!- they suspected!- they knew!- they were making a mockery of my horror!" (Poe 17). He claims that during the interrogation when he got the ringing in his ear, the police were making fun of him for suffering. This can't be true since they are police officers and they are very serious when it comes to interrogations, since it is their job. From this quote, it seems that he is upset that he is not the one in charge and he wants to believe that he did not do anything wrong and it's the police's fault for "making fun" of him. Another example is that in the text the narrator says, "I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever" (Poe 2). This is the reason behind why the narrator decided to kill the old man. He did it for his own satisfaction, he didn't like how he looked. Despite the many different strategies he could've used to avoid feeling uncomfortable about the eye, he resulted to murder. One can see that this quote is a clear example of how self-centered he is to commit murder because he never wanted to see the eye again, the narrator even says later in the story how the old man did nothing to him, the narrator just didn't like the look of his eye. These are two examples that prove that the reader cannot trust the narrator because the narrator is

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