What Is The Killer's Action In The Tell Tale Heart

The killer’s actions in The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe are described to the reader in a mixture of an internal monologue and fourth wall breaks, where the killer directly addresses the audience. These two methods of narration allow the main character to plead his case for sanity directly with the audience while allowing the reader to view the actions of the story through the killer’s eyes. Poe uses the juxtaposition of first person narration and fourth wall breaks to give the audience unique insight into the mind of a delusional, insane murderer. Poe structured the story in a way in which the killer addresses the audience less as the story goes on. And this decrease in interaction is inversely related to the increase in certainty that the audience has of the killer’s insanity and delusion.
In the very first paragraph of the short story the main character addresses the audience and accuses the reader of

“If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs”(Poe 724). The killer claims to be sane because he dismembers the corpse to hide it. While this method of hiding the body is clever it does nothing as an argument to address his hallucinations and insanity. The killer never addresses the audience again for the remainder of the story, a little over a page. And during that time the killer hears a sound that no one else could “It was a low, dull, quick sound—much such as sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath—and yet the officers heard it not” (Poe 724). Finally, there is concrete, indisputable evidence that the killer is hallucinating and the audience can definitively say he is mentally