A Tell-Tale Heart Literary Analysis

The concept of madness is an intricate and perplexing idea that is hard to understand, and even with years of knowledge and research on the topic, one can not expect to fully understand the intensity that this phenomenon can manifest itself. In Edgar Allen Poe's A Tell-Tale Heart, a man is faced with this very struggle and desperately pleas to convince the reader and possibly himself that he is in fact sane, but in his attempt, he only furthers the assumption that he is cursed with madness. The setting takes place in an unknown location where an unnamed man recants his twisted story of murder that led to his assumed imprisonment after confessing to the crime. The events that led to his confession, however, immerse the reader into the mind of …show more content…
The main character also serves as the narrator who depicts in vivid detail his act of murder, all the while asserting his “sanity”. Through his depiction of what happened, the narrator creates a physical appearance of the surroundings, but subsequently creates an image of his own mind that the reader can explore. When the narrator states, “Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded” he is making an attempt to prove he was not insane and that it was instead the old man for he knew not of what the protagonist had been conspiring to do (--). He then proceeds to comment in an almost gloating tone how strategically and cautiously he went about murdering the old man. To a reader, one could obviously conclude that the protagonist is in fact insane, but in the narrator's mind, he is just as sane as any other, maybe even more so. This ruse created by the narrator's mind is what makes him such an interesting character for it is his mind that makes the old man the antagonist in the story. In the statement, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult” the narrator fails to depict the old man as a typical antagonist for he had not exerted any antagonistic qualities (--). The old man is, however, made to be the …show more content…
At first, the man puts on an outward appearance of being a strategic and level headed individual, but after committing murder he was forced to bear the crushing psychological guilt that came with his actions thus throwing him into a spiral of insanity. By utilizing descriptive language, Poe successfully created an image of a man who seemed so innocent in his mind, but was destroyed by the guilt that was only exaggerated by his mental state and linked the entire story around the central theme how a simple emotion, such as guilt and fear, can ruin a person’s sanity. I believe that the story A Tell-Tale Heart still has significant value to today’s society and accurately represents how twisted someone can become with just a simple push over the edge and how little someone can truly understand it. Poe possibly tries to explain that truly, in the terms of the protagonist, “madmen know nothing”