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“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe deals with a man’s mental deterioration and his descent into madness. The story focuses on the narrator and his obsessions. It is told from a first person point of view by the protagonist himself. The point of view of the story is important because the reader only has one side of the story to work with. Therefore, the reader only knows what the narrator thinks and sees. This complicates things in deciding why the narrator goes insane. However, the narrator does reveal his insanity, and he reveals it through his obsessions. The narrator’s obsessions include; his obsessions with his own sanity, the old man’s evil eye, and the old man’s beating heart. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a story about a man, in this case the narrator, who for eight consecutive nights goes to the bedroom of another man. He stands at the door watching the man sleep with a single ray of light pointing directly at the sleeping man’s eye, an evil eye according to the narrator. On the eighth night, the man is sitting up in bed with his eye open, and the narrator, consumed by the “evil eye” and the sound of the man’s beating heart races into the room and kills the man in his bed. After the murder, the narrator dismembers the body, and buries the old man under his floor. As the story progresses, the narrator continually expresses that he is not mad. The way that he says this leads the reader to believe that the narrator is trying to convince him or her that he is not insane. However, he is really trying to convince himself that he is “not mad.” For instance, the narrator, at one point simply says, “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.
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