Destructive Power of Compulsive Thoughts - 'The Tell Tale Heart'
Everyone has thoughts that are intrusive in nature, thoughts that have the potential to be disturbing or distressing. Even though we have these thoughts, we know not to act on them. Only someone that is not in the right state of mind would act on these violent compulsions. “The Tell Tale Heart'' is short story by Edgar Allen Poe that is reviewed in this argumentative essay. Here we see that we are introduced to the main narrator of it is shown that he is unhinged in every way possible and his grip on reality is slipping as time goes on. The narrator has been struggling with deadly compulsions that led him to take the life of someone that, as he states, meant him no harm. Due to the extreme psychosis that the narrator was experiencing throughout the entirety of the story, he cannot be blamed for the murder of the older man. His delusions of the old man’s eye, paranoia, and hallucinations caused him to detach from reality and lash out aggressively.
As the narrator states, he had no animosity towards the older man and didn’t even want to steal from him. “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire”. The narrator didn’t have a motive to murder the man, and usually most murders are committed with some type of anger or grievence behind them. Instead, the narrator felt that a certain part of the older man’s body was reason enough to end his life. “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold”. The vulturous eye that this old man had sent a sense of irrational fear through his body that made him act in a violent manner to get rid of it. In his head, he envisioned the eye tormenting him and that the eye had the ability in itself to cause him harm. A completely sane person would understand that an organ cannot act upon free will. There was no rational thought behind his motives to harm someone that didn’t deserve to be harmed, the fear that he experienced sent his brain into action. “And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously—oh, so cautiously—cautiously (for the-hinges creaked)—I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye”. The narrator with the intention of killing the eye that was vexing him snuck into the older man’s room everyday, from what we can infer, an entire week to kill the eye, which was the only target of his rage. The fear that the narrator was experiencing was caused by a powerful delusion that compelled him to kill the eye was the only way, in his deluded mind, to end his mental suffering. Though the description of the 'Evil Eye' may appear to be the madman's deluded rationalization for his murders, the way he describes it suggests that this is the very thing that drove him to his crimes.
After the narrator has committed the murder of the older man, he begins to experience paranoia. This paranoia causes him to hyperfixate on the chronological events in order to convince himself, and the reader, that he is not going insane. Despite acknowledging that he has some kind of sensory disorder, Poe's narrator is not aware that he is experiencing a mental breakdown: 'have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?'. After the murder, he is utterly confident that he pulled off the crime without any flaws. '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”. Feeling free from the eye that was tormenting him, it lead him to boast about his sanity while committing the murder. The narrator was convinced that there was no way that anyone could find out about the murder that he committed.
When Poe's narrator invited the three officers in, he was at first certain that they suspected nothing. Though when he began to slip into a hallucination that was fueled by his paranoia and guilt, he began to believe that the policemen knew exactly what he did. As the narrator states, he couldn’t stand their “hypocritical smiles,” he utterly believed that these policemen were conspiring against him and were trying to trick him into giving himself up for the crime. Although mad, he is not entirely an unreliable narrator, for what we should consider is the way his obsession, his superstition concerning the older man’s eye generated an overwhelming stress which swallowed all of his thoughts and made him overly paranoid.of his surroundings. The extreme paranoia that the narrator has been experiencing disconnects him from the present reality that he is living, which further proves his mental state is continuing to disnigarate the longer that he tries to convince himself that he is not an insane person.
One of the delusions that the narrator has been experiencing is the presence of auditory hallucinations. Poe's narrator insists that his 'disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them,' and that 'Above all was the sense of hearing acute.' Yet when he goes on to add 'I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell', the reader is led to doubt related claims he makes regarding his auditory abilities. He explains, for example, that 'there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton'. As discussed earlier in the essay, the narrator under the guise of complete confidence of the perfect crime that he committed, let the three cops inside of the older man’s house. After allowing them to search the premises, he starts experiencing hallucinations as a result of fear that the police had finally caught up with him. “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!” While talking calmly to the policeman about the whereabouts of the older man, he begins to hear the dull beating of the older older man’s heart from under the floorboards where he disposed of his chopped off body parts. He interprets this sound as the beating of the old man's heart, but it would have been impossible for him to hear such a noise unless his ears were against the old man's chest and the fact that the old man is dead. As the narrator claims to hear sounds in heaven, hell, and earth, it seems more likely that it wasn't the sound of the dead heart beating under the floorboards , but rather an auditory hallucination. These hallucinations that the narrator goes through when he begins to experience extreme stress push his brain into a state where he threw rationality out of the window. Sane people who commit horrendous crimes such as these never give themselves up unless they are caught. Even though the narrator seemed to be losing his mind from the beginning of the short story, this final stress caused him to admit to the crime that he committed.
The short story, “Tell-Tale Heart'' by Edgar Allen Poe, shows what happens to a person that is struggling with insanity that leads him to deal with delusions that control his day to day life. The narrator believes that the old man who has an eye like a vulture is threatening his life. The fear and paranoia from the eye that was out to get him convinced him that he has to rid his old man’s life. The paranoia that he was experiencing drove him to having auditory hallucinations of a heart under the floorboards. Additionally, he hears voices within himself that make him furious and nervous. This series of delusions assaulted his mental state to the point that it caused him to mutilate and kill the older man in a desperate effort to regain a sense of normalcy and calm. The anxiety, delusions, and hallucinations are symptoms that indicate the narrator is suffering from psychosis that causes him to slip from reality. The narrator can’t possibly be blamed for the crime that he committed. While it is true that he planned out the murder of the older man, but his motives for the crime line up directly with delusions that he is suffering with. His grip with reality at the end of the story seemed to be completely gone when he gave himself up. Though we do not know any other details about the narrator, we do not know that he has harmed anyone else with the intent to kill them. In my opinion, this one time where his delusions were strong enough to cause him to hurt someone doesn’t mean that the narrator is a dangerous individual. Instead of being blamed for the crime that he committed, the narrator needs help from a mental institution that could help him with staying grounded in the external reality that mentally sane people experience.
