The One Hit Narrator

Essay by gbhforever13Junior High, 9th gradeA+, August 2006

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Sitting, watching, waiting, for the opportune moment to sneak in and end a life. Are you scared yet? This treacherous story, the "Tell-Tale Heart", by Edgar Allen Poe, follows a devious maniac through his journey with a murder. This all involves floorboards, an evil eye, and a crazed gentleman. The narrator is quite the homicidal genius because of his dreadfully creepy personality, intelligence, and his psychotic ways.

Obviously, Mr. Narrator is creepy for the fact he can watch a man sleep for hours upon hours of a night. "Every night, about midnight, I would turn the latch of his door and open it-oh so gently". So the narrator clearly has no problem at all treating this man as if he were a vegetable, chopping him up into bite sized pieces and all. "First of all I dismembered the corpse", as he said. I must say, I have caught myself talking to no one quite a number of times, but I still find it somewhat odd to see a man, talk to himself as much as our dear narrator does.

I'm sure you're getting chills just thinking of him.

Even though our dear narrator gives us all the creeps, he's quite the thinker. He cleverly blueprinted out how he would do everything for the next week leading up to the grand faunally of the old mans life. He went through it just as planed, "every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept". Though this would be the part of his plan to fail, he knew the exact words he would utter to the police. "The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country", said just like that. As was said before, cutting up the old man to make him a suitable size for his new home underneath the floor is quite disturbing, yes, but also a remarkable hiding place. Brilliant, the man was, but you must never crack under pressure.

As I'm sure you can tell, a man willing to kill isn't anything but a psychotic man, like our dear narrator. You must know, someone who takes most of his time trying to convince everyone he isn't crazy, is the worst of all. When the narrator says, "Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me", is just one sentence trying to persuade you to believe his "sanity". Well in the end, I understand guilty conscience, but to exaggerate the simple tick of an aged timepiece to the impractical heart beat of a lifeless body is, well, psychotic. Which obviously our narrator is..."here, here!-it is the beating of his hideous heart!". Although, I myself, agree with our dear narrator about not being able to handle the constant watch from an evil eye of the colors pure white and gray, then again not enough to kill. P-S-Y-C-H-O, I think we all know whose psycho.

After all our killer of a narrator is notably brilliant, disturbing, and considerably crazy. Despite the narrator's amazing plan of how to murder and how to dispose of the body, his own sub-conscience becomes his undoing.