Madness and the Subsequent Dismal Ending Within “The Tell-Tale Heart” our unnamed Narrator displays many qualities of madness, which inevitably lead to his dismal ending. The Narrator shows symptoms of madness through his seemingly unprovoked malice towards the old man he had claimed to have no quarrel with. After appearing to be caught by police in an exert from the opening of the chronicle, the Narrator attempts to prove his sanity; “but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not dulled them. .
And he kills an old man for no other reason than because his eye makes “his blood run cold”. The story starts out erratic, “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”(228). The narrator cannot even speak in complete sentences, or even complete thoughts here and that sends up a red flag that something might be off in his head. He claims his madness is not really madness; it is just his sharpened senses. “The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.
A rhetorical question is used twice (How then am I mad?) in the first paragraph to address the readers directly to make us feel involved. “Observe how calmly I can tell you the whole story.’ ‘excited me to uncontrollable terror’ Contradiction is used, as we can see from how nervously he tells us the story that he is clearly not calm although he claims he’s serene. Moreover the narrator tells us that he loves the old man (whom he is shortly to murder), but as he does so, he is giggling. This shows the unsettledness and capricious nature of the narrator’s mood and his mind in general.
This was because of the guilt of murdering the man and the fear of being caught. As a result, he confesses the crime he committed. The heart of the old man is said to excite him to uncontrollable terror before he killed the old man. This made him kill the old man. This contributes in proving the insanity of the narrator.
So their madness, in this case, is the hypersensitivity and hyperactivity of their nerves. Edgar Allan Poe says: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing.” If we take this statement, the “wise precautions” taken by the protagonist of “the tell-tale Heart” to hide the corpse justify his madness. The protagonist had no feeling of
/ The killer, ambushed by excitement, announces: “And now a new anxiety seized me—the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man's hour had come!” (2). / The narrator decides the old man’s time is up, which reveals the inner evil of the madman. / In this short story, Poe uses the eye and heart to symbolize the perils of evil. / The author uses the old man’s “evil” eye as a stimulus
As the storm approaches around him, King Lear goes mad, tortured by the pain of the turn his life has received. The madness is the understandable reaction to a life that has no meaning or purpose. Mad can also be used to describe upset and deranged. People seen King Lear this way quite often but some didn’t understand why. My mom has always said “For every action, there is a reaction.” I believe that all the “madness” that is going on is all for a reason.
A self-professed madman, he try’s to give reasons for his four recorded "bouts of insanity" but no amount of explaining can justify "losing contact with reality". Humbert's outlook is dark, coloring everything he sees. He is extremely cynical, assuming (or, perhaps, hoping) that others are as twisted as he is. Part of this impulse is, of course, to make his crimes seem more natural. At one point he exclaims “Ah!
187-8.) This pretense of madness Shakespeare borrowed from the earlier versions of the story. The fact that he has made it appear like real madness to many critics today only goes to show the wideness of his knowledge and the greatness of his dramatic skill. In the play the only persons who regard Hamlet as really mad are the king and his henchmen, and even these are troubled with many doubts. Polonius is the first to declare him mad, and he thinks it is because Ophelia has repelled his love.
Katerina Saker Nicole Camastra English 1113 1, October 2012 A reflection on fear and its power Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” addresses, in a retrospective confession of the narrator's murder of an old man, the destructive power of fear. The narrator claims to be suffering from a disease which heightens his senses, makes him more aware of the strange eye of the old man with whom he lives, and causes him to be more sensitive to minute sounds such as heartbeats. He believes that the eye always watches him, causing a profound anxiety to overtake him and consequently to kill the old man. Police arrive to his house on account of suspicion from a neighbor; while initially calm, fear of being discovered for his murder is violently ignited within him as he is deafened by the sound of a heartbeat which causes him to confess. Although “The Tell-Tale Heart” appears to inherently address sanity, the narrator actually reflects, through the use of sharp imagery and acute auditory sense, upon the destructive power of his fear of death and discovery and how that paranoia has changed his entire being from one of confidence to one of anxiety and guilt.