Jay Prather Matthiessen ELA 08 - Period 1 06 March 2023 Guilty by Reason of Insanity While reading the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the reader may have wondered about whether the murderer is guilty of murder by reason of insanity, or if he is guilty of 1st degree murder. In this story, the main antagonist is the narrator. The narrator wants to get rid of his old neighbor’s eye. To do this, he decides to stalk his neighbor and sneak into his house every night to watch him sleep. One night, when he finally sees the old man’s eye, he kills him. Then he chopped up the old man and hid him in the floorboards. When the police come, he hears the deafening sound of his neighbor’s heartbeat. It gets so loud that he snaps and …show more content…
It is clear that the murderer had no motive and he was acting impulsively. The murderer did not have any plan of when to kill the old man and he watched him for 7 nights to make sure that he could see the eye. “For it was not the old man I felt so I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye.” (Para 7, Poe) Using the quote as evidence, you can see that the murderer had no motive other than the fact that he didn't like the old man’s eye. In case you still don’t think that the murderer only wanted to kill the eye and not the man, this next quote will prove that he does. “There was no reason for what I did. I did not hate the old man; I even loved him. He had never hurt me. I didn't want his money. I think it was his eye.His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait until an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it.” (Para 3, Poe) The quote above shows that the murderer loved the old man, but he only killed him to get rid of his eye. The murderer is criminally insane because he acts impulsively and has no motive to kill the old …show more content…
The murderer is guilty by reason of insanity because he thought that killing the neighbor's eye would not hurt the old man. “For it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye.” ( Allan Poe, 65) This quote proves that the murderer is criminally insane because he thought that he needed to kill the old man’s eye, not the old man. The next quote will further prove that the murderer is criminally insane. “I think it was his eye. His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then upon the dead body and pull it to pieces. When the old man looked upon me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man.” (Allan Poe, 65) The quote proves that the murderer is guilty by reason of insanity because he only killed the old man to make his eye go away. The murderer is guilty of murder by reason of