The Narrator In Tell-Tale Heart

The narrator’s words and actions present him as an unreasonable, and untrustworthy narrator. The narrator of Tell Tale Heart attempts to justify his actions and prove to the audience why he is not insane. The reason he tells the story is to try and defend his sanity, yet he confesses to killing the old man that he is a caretaker for. Ironically, he gives proof that he does have a paranoid personality disorder, when trying to convince the audience that what he did was not insane.
The old man, who lives with the narrator, becomes the victim of murder. The narrator believes that the old man’s abnormal eye may have started the idea of killing the old man. He decided that the old man must die so that he wouldn't have to deal with the eye anymore. Every night the narrator would sneak into the old mans room to watch him sleep. He was extremely paranoid when sneaking into the old man’s room, because he is nervous of waking him. After sneaking into his bedroom, he is unable to kill him because he was sleeping, which means he cant see his eye. The old man wakes up to realize that someone is in his room, so he becomes immediately frightened. The narrator noticed the scared, and awake old man. He can hear the old mans frightened heart beating, and at one point he felt that it was so loud that he had to jump on …show more content…
As he proclaims his own sanity, the narrator is haunted by the old man’s eye. The murder of the old man depicts the extent to which the narrator separates the old man's identity from his eye. He sees the eye as completely separate from the old man himself. As a result, he is capable of murdering him while continuing to love him. Because of his corrupt sense of reality, he obsesses over the low beats of the mans heart, yet shows little concern about the mans shrieks, which are loud enough to attract both a neighbors attention and to eventually draw the police to the scene of the