Donna Peters                                                                                      

Professor Rachel Corona                                                                     

English 102

            The tell-tale Heart is a ghastly story which characterized an unknown narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man.

            What character does the narrator say prove his sanity is subtly portrayed throughout the story. The narrator started off by admitting to having a disease, but insisted that he was not mad. He verbalize his action in such clear, cunning and precise manner for which he stated a madmen would not be able to detail. To him his disease caused him to feel and experience some form of nervousness, but nothing resembles madness. The narrator admits or confess to horrible crime with a rational precision of killing the old man, but never admit to being psychotic. Nevertheless, his behaviors reflected that of a person with mental issues, when he made mentioned of hearing all thing in heaven and in earth and many things in hell. This does suggest hallucination and dilution to a vast magnitude.

The narrator insisted from the beginning that he was not crazy, by verbalizing clearly his action in such accuracy that a mad man would not be able to do, a midst the fact he sometime felt nervous. He admit that he has a disease, but it did not make him insane. His disease has sharpened his senses, ‘not dull or destroyed it”. Above all, He pointed to the fact that he was quite healthy by showing no sign of aggression and calmly tell the whole story in such accuracy and detail.  All he did the design of the story from beginning to the end points out the level of madness of the narrator. His pattern of behavior throughout the story depict a mental illness, as he disclosed a deep psychological confusion. His behavior reflect a form of paranormal motivation when he stated that “object there was none, passion there was none, I loved that old man…” Yet in spite of this affection he says that the idea of murder “haunted me day and night”.  This process of thinking is also evident to convict him of madness, when confessed to the killing due to hearing the still beating heart of the old man’s corpse. The evidence of him describing that he didn't have any contention with the old man, but with his eye, hence, he compared it to a vulture’s eye and refers to it an “evil eye.” This was motivating factor that drove him make kill the old man. He said, “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever”. The description of how he outlined the plot to carefully and cautiously execute his plan is evident of a sociopaths behavior.