The Tell-Tale Heart Narrator

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The narrator of “The Tell Tale Heart” is mentally ill, and I’m here today to tell you his side of the story, and what might be wrong with him. What troubled the narrator so much was, the old man’s eye; “he had the eye of a vulture- a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” Whenever he looked at it, “it made his blood run cold.” He loved the old man, he had never wronged him, but the eye drove him insane.

What has pondered my mind so far, is simply the questions: Does the narrator know this is wrong, and will he take responsibility for it? I’m predicting no, but let’s see. So, very gradually, “He made up his mind to take the old man’s life and rid himself of the eye forever.” For seven nights, every night at midnight, he turned the latch of the …show more content…
Then, the narrator heard a groan, a “groan of moral terror”. Suddenly he realized that the old man had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. He had been thinking to himself: “It is nothing but the wind in the chimney--- it is only a mouse crossing the floor.” “He had simply been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions; but he had found all in vain.” Death had been approaching …show more content…
The narrator is doing his job so carefully, and is so eager to kill the old man. I doubt he will take responsibility for what he’s done, but it’s not over yet.

With a loud yell he “threw open the lantern and leaped into the room.” “He shrieked once.” Quickly, the narrator dragged the old man onto the floor and pulled the heavy bed over him. After a few minutes he “removed the bed and examined the corpse.”

The old man was dead. “The eye would trouble him no more.” Eventually he took up 3 planks from the flooring of the chamber and then deposited the body in between the scantlings. As cleverly and carefully as can be, he replaced the boards back on the floor so that “no human eye; not even the old man’s could detect anything wrong.”

It was 4 o’ clock in the morning--- still as dark as it was midnight, of course, there was a knocking at the street door. It was the police. “A shriek had been heard by a neighbor in the middle of the night.” They had been assigned to search the premises. The narrator smiled. “For what did he have to fear?” He welcomed the gentlemen. “The shriek, he said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, is absent in the country.” The officers searched everywhere, and finally, they were
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