The Tell Tale Heart and Edgar Allan Poe’s Schizophrenia
The Tell Tale Heart and Edgar Allan Poe’s Schizophrenia
Edgar Allan Poe is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original writers in American literature. His skillfully wrought tales and poems convey with passionate intensity the mysterious, dreamlike, and often macabre forces that pervaded his sensibility. He is also considered the father of the modern detective story.
The Tell Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator remains nameless and sexless in the story. H/she takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear. At the beginning of the story, the narrator says that he loved the old man but he hates his eye and h/she believes that the eye is evil. H/she confesses that the one and only reason for killing the old man is his eye: "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man". The narrator begins the story by trying to convince the reader that h/she is not insane. The fact that the old man's eye is the only motivation to murder proves the narrator is mentally unstable.
For seven nights precisely at midnight, the narrator enters the old man's room to observe the eye. On the eighth night the narrator enters the room and the old man sat suddenly in his bed, crying out "who's there?" the narrator stood still for over an hour, as did the old man who did not lie back down. Then h/she opened the lantern slightly and the ray was on the eye only. This made the narrator go furious and he moved to the old man who shrieked once, he/she dragged him off his bed and killed him. The old man's body was chopped and buried under the planks of the floor. The police came because of a shriek reported by a neighbor. H/she invited them and they sat chatting, after a while the narrator started hearing the old man's heart beating from under the flooring. The heart beat grew louder and louder, finally h/she confesses of killing the old man.
At the beginning of the story the narrator asks the reader if they think of him mad: "I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?" the more h/she keeps asking the more the reader is convinced that h/she is mentally unstable. The...