The Tell-Tale Heart Analysis

     The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story written by Edgar Ellen Poe and published in January, 1843. In this short story, presumably, a man who is the narrator murders an old man because the old man possess a blue vulture-like eye that frightens the man. It took the narrator seven nights to prepare his plan to murder the old man but on the eighth night, he woke the old man in his sleep. Consequently, the old man was awake and his vulture eye was open which provoked the narrator to murder him. During the night, he murders the old man and dissembled his body so he could hide it under the floorboards of the old man's chamber. The next day, police arrived at the scene of the crime because a neighbor reported to them that there was a shriek next door in the previous night. When the police searched the house, they were convinced that it was the narrator shrieking in his dreams the night before. As time progresses, the narrator began to hear the old man's heart beating under the floorboard so he confessed to having murdered the old man and hid his body under the floorboards which concludes the story.

     After performing some research on this story, it seems that the narrator of the story  is trying to retell the murder in order to prove that he is not insane. At the beginning of the story, he mentions how after having the disease, his senses of hearing were increased to prove that the disease provides him with benefits that insanity would not provide. In addition, if he is trying to prove that he is not insane, then he would have to go to prison for murdering the old man. That could mean that he might have been sent to the asylum for being insane and because he is truly becoming insane in that place, he wants to escape so he have to prove his sanity to the person who he is talking during his recall of the event.

      Also from researching about the story, this whole account could just be a manifestation of the narrator's dream. Throughout the whole story, it can be inferred that the narrator hates the old man's vulture eye and wants to kill him so if he keep thinking about it in the day, it is likely that he dreams about it at night. In addition, at the beginning, the narrator is also very nervous and in the middle, there was a shriek which could mean that the narrator just woke up from a dream and shrieked about the beating heart that was at the end of his dream.