Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell Tale Heart - Book Report/Review Example

The narrator compared the eye to that of a vulture's eye that can find its prey through the thickest mist. The eye, that pierces through his very soul. The eye knew him all too well such that when the old man looked at him "his blood ran cold". Perhaps it is this eye that has made him mentally unstable. Perhaps this eye represents the way Poe's Foster Father looked at him when he was already behaving lower than what was expected of him. Remember that Poe's Foster father eventually gave up on him for Poe fell short of his expectations when Poe left school and was always drunk.

Perhaps, Poe, the writer is the narrator. As a writer, he transferred his thoughts, feelings, and emotions into the narrator's being. This will account for the very vivid descriptions and exact transfer of emotions from the writer to the literary piece. You can actually feel and hear the building up of emotions as you read through the story. He denies that he is insane for his senses are not dull. He can think and the best proof is the execution of the murder and the manner that he hid the body.

True, he was able to execute the act and perhaps he committed the same during a lucid interval but this does not conclusively prove that he was not mentally ill before, during or after killing the old man. Mental illness is not always present. The mentally ill do have lucid intervals when they can think, rationalize and act very normal. At times even better than the average person. In fact, because of his constant fixation, his senses became sharp. He had to drown out other thoughts to concentrate and fix his focus and energies to killing the eye.

He has been in the old man's room several times, seven times to be exact, but he did not kill the old man. It was on the eighth night when he saw the old man awake and the eye looking at him that he just had to stop the eye from looking at him. So, he killed the old man. If the eye had not opened and looked at him, I think he would not have killed the old man that night. He was just waiting for the eye to make its presence known. Isn't this an act of a sick and mentally ill person A person who is not ill would have just killed the man at the first opportunity he had.

Why wait 8 nights Furthermore, he had been going to see the old man every night for 8 consecutive nights. He had the energy to do that every night. Mentally ill patients cannot sleep. They show no signs of fatigue. Just like the narrator. The final proof of the narrators' unstable mind is that he could hear things that other people cannot. He could hear the clock tick louder and louder when it should emit only a constant and monitored ticking sound. And as a finishing touch to this lunacy, he heard the thumping of the old man's heart grew louder and louder underneath the floorboards.

All of the narrator's thoughts, feelings, and actions clearly convey a disturbed man. These are true signs of a person who is mentally ill. .