The Narrator’s Insanity in “the Tell-Tale Heart”

The Narrator’s Insanity in “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Edgar Allan Poe, possibly to compete with the Dark Romantic contemporaries of his time, frequently uses insanity as a major motif in his works. Madness plagues Roderick Usher, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Montresor, in “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the narrator in “The Black Cat.” “The Tell-Tale Heart” is no exception to Poe’s style in writing, as Poe uses obsessive diction to show that the symbols of the Evil Eye, the Evil “I”, and time make the narrator go insane.

The Evil Eye as a motive for murder in “The Tale-Tale Heart” serves as a symbol that drives the narrator to insanity. The narrator claims there is no object or passion to motivate him to perpetrate the murder, and that he “loves” the old man; however, the narrator decides to kill the old man solely because of the old man’s vulture-like eye (Poe 1). This motive is clearly insignificant to perpetrate a crime as serious as murder and any “rational person” can see no logic behind the narrator’s reason to kill the old man (McArthur 85). The narrator’s motive makes the reader question his sanity. Furthermore, Poe clearly presents the Evil Eye as a driving factor that pushes the narrator to his insanity. After the narrator presents the eye as a motive for murder, he goes to lengths to describe his procedures watching the old man every night, shining a ray of light on the old man’s eye (Poe 1-2). Later, however, the narrator describes the Evil Eye in a more frantic manner. “I grew furious as I gazed upon [the eye]… [The eye] chilled the very marrow in my bones” (Poe 2). The narrator’s tone describing the Evil Eye changes over the story and it is clear that his fear of it “consumes” him and that he becomes a “victim” of the “madness which he had hoped to elude” (Womack 4). Not only does the Evil Eye affect the narrator’s composure, but the sheer terror it incites in him, which clearly increases as he plans and prepares for his murder, makes him...