http://www.americanliterature.com/Poe/SS/TheTell-TaleHeart.html
I read The Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe. I have read this story once before in 8th grade, and I thought that I would get a lot more out of it reading it again, and I was right!
The story starts off mid-thought with an unnamed protagonist trying to convince us that he'
s sane in his actions. Then he tells us a gruesome story of wanting to kill an old man lodger simply because he's got a creepy eye. He then kills the old man, and breaks down when the police show up to search his place (the old man shrieked when he was stabbed), and convinces to the murder.
Throughout the story, the protagonist keeps trying to convince us that he's sane, then immediately confirming his insanity to us. For example, "the disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?". While saying that he's sane in the next paragraph he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me....I think it was his eye!...I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." Wanting to kill a man that he admittedly loves just because he has a creepy eye, by my and most readers viewpoint, makes this person insane.
As the story goes on, his "evidence" of his sanity gets more and more shoddy, but he insists that he is. Saying, "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-with what caution-with what foresight-with what dissimulation I went to work!". This reminds me of that common assumption that old people don't know that they're insane. I think that this goes to the theme of the story.
When the police show up, the reason that he confesses to the murder is because he thinks that the heart of the old man is beating so loudly that it's driving the man crazy. In reality (I believe) the heart beating is actually the protagonists inner feelings of guilt arising in ways that he himself cannot see since his grasp on reality is so shaky. The most guilty sounding line I could find was where he says, "I felt that I must scream or die!" I think that using the word, "scream" means to confess, and that "death" would be from guilt.
The theme of the protagonists guilt finding a way to show itself is in the title, "the Tell Tale Heart". The protagonist doesn't conscious feel guilty, so it surfasses in the more and more rapid beating of a heart symbolizing his need to tell the truth. In the end though the protagonist is insane, he has a heart of his own, by feeling guilt and remorse for his actions. they just manifested themselves in odd ways.
