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The vicious narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Poe’s most iconic characters, a killer unaware of his own madness who throughout the tale tries desperately to convince the audience that he is not insane. The narrator pleads his sanity by portraying himself as extremely sensitive, able to perceive things in a nearly superhuman manner (“I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.”). His high estimation of his abilities extends to how he carries out his crime, and he brags about his patience, his careful movements, and his cunning in being kind to the old man’s face. By the narrator’s estimation, if his perception is so strong and his movements so planned and careful, he cannot possibly be mad. However, his understanding of himself ignores that his primary motivation is incredibly irrational. His goal is to kill an old man because one of the old man’s eyes has an unusual appearance. If the narrator has a sensitivity, it appears to be emotional. His discomfort over the eye’s appearance is thus magnified to terror, and his guilt over the murder agitates him to the point of confession.
What makes the narrator such a fascinating character is that the calculated nature of his behavior around the crime does not seem to match the irrationality of his motives. He takes an almost unsettling delight in his patience and planning. He displays a disturbing coldness in dismembering the body and meticulously cleaning the crime scene. He then gloats about his crime by leading the police officers directly to the crime scene. Were it not for his nightly vigils and hallucination of the old man’s heartbeat, it might be tempting to read him as using the old man’s eye as an excuse for an otherwise motiveless murder. Nevertheless, the narrator appears to both desire to separate the eye he loathes from the man he loves and understand that the only way to accomplish such a thing is murder. Just as it is impossible to separate the eye from the old man, it is impossible to separate the narrator’s madness and irrationality from his murderous cunning.
