- nervous- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am…” Then later says in the same paragraph, “… observe how healthily- how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” He is obsessive and emotionally unstable, and is so delusional that he is detached from his own anxiety. When he discusses his target- an old, innocent man, it makes the reader wonder why he wants to kill the old man. He says, ‘I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.’ He later explains, “I think it was his eye!
In addition to the tale's theme of sanity and insanity, Poe acquaints the readers with two others:Guilt and Innocence, and Time being the narrator's true foe, not Death. The Tell-Tale Heart details the story of a seemingly mad individual who kills his friend for no apparent reason other than the fact that he could not deal with the old man's silvery eye. After murdering the old man, the narrator still hears his beating heart from underneath the floor where he buried him. Overcome with guilt, he finally ends up confessing his heinous crime to the police. At first glance, a reader can assume that Poe meant this tale to be a straightforward parable about self-betrayal by one's conscience and guilt.
Jayme Mccutcheon 3/10/14 Journal #1 “ The Tell- Tale heart” I felt this was a very interesting story to read. The narrator spent the majority if time giving the reader evidence why he should be seen as not “mad” but just a nervous person. However, all of his actions are those of a paranoid crazy person. The narrator describes an old man as someone he loves, someone who has never wronged him and mentions he did not want his money but he decides to kill this man. The only reason for wanting the old man dead was because of his eye which “resembled that of a vulture- a pale blue eye, with a film over it”.
In "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Sharif2 Tumor", (Sherman Alexie) tells how one man tries to use humor to deny the reality of his terminal cancer. He shows how humor can be taken too far. This story demonstrates how humor can destroy one part of your life as it helps you cope with another. Trying to look at it in different perceptive, jimmy has a terminal cancer and he dearly loves his wife watching the people you love go through stages of knowing you’re going to die is very depressing. what jimmy did was humor the people around him, seeing the his wife smile even though he was ill made him happy although Norma hated that he jokes a lot about his tumor.
He even contemplates suicide but his rational mind stops him from doing so. Hamlet is painfully aware that committing suicide will damn his soul to hell. Shortly after, Hamlet meets with the ghost of his father. The ghost of King Hamlet tells Hamlet that Claudius, the brother of King Hamlet, killed him. The ghost asks Hamlet to avenge his “most foul murder.” However, he warns Hamlet not to let revenge consume his mind.
He states ‘tis an unweeded garden’ alluding to the fact that a false king leads to corruption which finally leads to the collapse of the hierarchy. Initially Hamlet has no internal conflict when it comes to avenging his father’s murder, but he is very quickly drawn into contemplation about the world and mortality. Hamlet as a character is enigmatic and it is these aspects of his personality that allow for his pondering of the world. In his Act 3 Scene 3 soliloquy, Hamlet finally reveals to the audience that he is going to honour his fallen father and avenge his death. However, his reasoning behind hesitation is that Claudius will go to heaven with a forgiven soul ‘and so he goes to heaven’.
In Kafka’s short story “In The Penal Colony”, The Officer is the judge of the colony and punishes men who may or may not be considered guilty by more humane men. He takes the ultimate sacrifice in the end when he realizes that he is the one who should be punished and he uses the machine—that he used to worship—to kill himself. The two villains are similar in the fact that they both murder people for unjustifiable reasons, however, they differ when it comes to morals and confidence. Captain Torres kills rebels whether they did anything or not. He doe not care about their intentions as he states that all the rebels will be punished (p.443).
–nervous—very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?) telling you exactly what he wants you to get out of this double telling story by implying that he is still nervous about something, but he is not crazy, despite committing murder for no apparent reason other than the fact that he didn’t like the old man’s “vulture eye.” Poe tells a story that on the surface appears to be more plain and visible than what it really is. Some people try to go a little deeper, deciphering what the narrator is trying to tell the audience and
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.
The narrator speaks directly to the reader and opens the story by claiming that he is “dreadfully nervous” but not mad. He also maintains that he has sharpened senses due to his disease especially an abnormally acute hearing. He then tells a story to defend his plea of sanity by confessing to a murder of an old man - which basically contradicts and defeats his argument. He explains that his motivation to eradicate the old man’s existence is neither passion nor desire for the man’s possessions but rather the fear of the old man’s pale blue, vulture-like eye. He insists that he is not a madman for he carried out his scheme artfully like a criminal mastermind.