The Tell Tale Heart

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“Character Analysis of the Narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart”
The Tell-Tale Heart was a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in the mid-19th century. The gist of the story revolved around the plot of the narrator to kill the old man who had vulture-eye. Moreover, the story accentuated the narrator’s claim that he was sane when he did the crime. Thus, this story raised an issue about insanity defense. However, the fact that the narrator avoided to claim that he was insane, given the lighter sanction for mentally-ill offenders, brought dramatic irony in the story. According to Wall (2013), Edgar Allan Poe purposely invoked the discourse on insanity defense in order “to make the protagonist’s unconscious self-condemnation and the narrator’s unconscious self-conviction reinforce each other in order to convey the implicit moral in a highly dramatic and ironic manner” (p. 130).
The narrator possessed a vague identity; while most of the readers would contend that he was insane for committing such crime, the narrator also circumvented the intention and purpose of a normal person. Hence, some scholars believed that in this case, Poe wrote a “problematic narrative of insanity” in the person of the narrator (Wall, 2013, p. 130). Though he acknowledged his “disease” of being dreadfully nervous, narrator also insisted that he had sharp senses making him aware of his action. As a matter of fact, he established a strong belie…