He is Mad

Essay by onvinhtanUniversity, Bachelor'sA, October 2004

download word file, 5 pages 4.2 2 reviews

"Villains!" I shrieked, "Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! Here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!" (p.116). This is how Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" catastrophically ends. Here, the erratic Narrator Poe deforms the story in such a way that we, as the readers, are brought into an extreme reality of a mentally imbalance, paranoid assassin's imaginative world of delusion. As we read the story, we will definitely find some parts where the narrator's fellness into insanity is clearly indicated; sorted from his appalling nervousness, his denial about his madness, his irrational reason to kill the old man, his response to the over-acuteness of his hearing sense, and his conviction about the fact that he is utterly normal. The central character in this particular piece of story is pretty complex and in this case, I will use my own personal experience and psychological knowledge as the evidence to support my views.

Just as from the beginning of the story, the narrator has strongly revealed the potential of him being a mad man. His confession of being "very, very dreadfully nervous" (p.112) must have been a sign that he knows that there is something wrong about him. This fact is even reemphasized by the over- sharpness of his hearing sense which he pointed out as a "disease". "I heard all things in the heaven and the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?" (p.112). I believe that the " heaven, earth, and hell" in this meticulous quote are the forms of symbolisms that present the narrator's illusion of his own world that other people cannot even experience or understand, and that is the reason why he is able to consider his occurrence...