Yaritza Antigua
Professor Molly Kenner
ENG_105
17 January 2015
in the story “the tell-tale heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a story based on someone’s imaginary thoughts on thinking someone’s out to hurt him. This story was written as if the narrator was mentally disorder. He was a physco person. So one should not believe on his evidences he is unreliable. Edgar Allan Poe is an perfect example of an unreliable narrator, because he is telling the entire story himself and there is no objective narration to back up his belief. The first lines of the story show this, as the narrator is trying to explain that he is not mad, that he is perfectly sane, only that he is in some illness that bothers his senses. For example in the text there’s various statements that made the narrator look crazy, why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them... How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story. I think A reliable narrator would not be pressed to justify his act, but only to tell it. Since the narrator cannot explain his actions without constantly explaining himself, he can't be fully trusted; his later mental breakdown as he imagines the beating of the old man's heart shows that his mind is not healthy. If the story is taken allegorically, it is possible that the crime was imaginary and the narrator explaining his motivations in a sanitarium. In this story, the unreliable narrator is the key to both the crime itself and its solution; had the narrator had less guilt, and more mental stability
Poe was a master of the first-person narrator, and that technique, so treacherous in the hands of a lesser artist, makes for unusual intimacy between the reader and the storyteller. Indeed, one is drawn into the tormented mind of the madman. The mind is especially Poe’s domain, with its interplay of emotions, its mixture of reality and fantasy, and its ultimate mystery. To convey the impressions and feeling that he wanted, Poe relied on a variety of rhetorical tools, and he carefully crafted every sentence. However, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is convincingly spontaneous and filled with those little details that heighten the realism. Devoted to art for art’s sake, Poe probed the limits of human reality in stories
