Sanity in The Tell-Tale Heart Literary Analysis Essay Sample

There are many instances in the story where you can find the concept of sanity, or rather the lack of it, presented. One example of this would be when the narrator describes the old man's eye. He says “the eye resembled that of a vulture, pale, blue. ” Both vultures and eyes are known for being very symbolic and representative of certain feelings and characteristics. Vultures are carnivorous and eat carrion (the dead, decaying flesh of other animals). While vultures eat mostly dead animals, they are capable of attacking and will often prey on extremely sick, wounded, or infirm prey. They are scavengers and fly high above, circling a prey that looks sick or weak. Because of this, vultures represent a damning being, judging and watching to see if you are strong or weak.  Eyes are probably the most important symbolic sensory organ. You can find symbols of eyes in many cultures and religions across the world. Qualities that eyes get commonly associated with are: intelligence, light, vigilance, moral conscience, and truth. The eye frequently means judgment and authority. 

By using the symbolism of the eye and vulture’s,  it shows how the narrator subconsciously thinks the old man is judging him. While the old man, though we don’t know much about him, seems to be quite an average or normal person, the use of symbolism by the author, to describe how the narrator sees the old man, is clear. The author chooses to do this because  no one likes being judged and whether the reader understands or not it gives an unnerving feeling. The narrator seems to be especially sensitive towards being judged, since throughout the story there are several instances where he is intent on convincing the reader that he is not insane. Though he may not be aware of it, the narrator can’t deal with the anxious feeling of judgment that he gets from the old man. This leads him to resort to violence and kill the old man, in order to silence and end the unsettling feeling he senses.

From the very first line of the story, and continuously throughout the rest of the text, the narrator of the story seems adamant to convince us that he is not mad. He does this so often that it starts to have the opposite effect. He makes comments and rhetorical questions that give the reader a clear picture on how he personally views “madmen”. In one instance he says “Ha! — would a madman have been so wise as this? ” and, “If you still think me mad, you will no longer think so when I describe the wise precaution I took. ” The narrator seems to be under the impression that someone considered a madman or insane could not be intelligent or careful. His perception of the word is obviously negative, and his continuous effort to prove he isn’t a madman, shows that he seems to find this offensive and incorrect. His efforts to convince he isn’t mad end up having the opposite effect, making him seem more unhinged and irrational, less sane and more like a madman.

Taking this into account, it makes a relative amount of sense that the narrator killed the old man. Not to say that it is morally correct, but evidently there was a semblance of logic and reasoning behind the murder of the old man, though it was based off of his imagination not reality. This brings up the question of whether he is indeed insane. But though one might say that he isn’t, I would argue that he still is. Not only are his actions, as far as we know, based off of his own imagination and clearly unstable mental state, but his response and subsequent actions were completely and absolutely disproportionate. This is supported in the text because of the author's choice to not provide any evidence that the old man was, in fact, judgmental, and because the narrator himself doesn’t seem to be able to explain why he murdered the old man. Though he does know that it was the eye that bothered him, he doesn’t seem to know why it bothered him so much, only that he hated whenever it gazed at him. The author's stylistic choices also emphasize the idea that the narrator isn’t in control of his actions or emotions. Whenever the narrator speaks, he seems to be overexcited, nervous or ecstatic, and if you take a step back and simply look at the text, you will see an assortment of exclamation points, italics, dashes, and questions marks that give off a sense of chaos and disorder in his speech. All this together leave the reader with a feeling of disorder and an unstable atmosphere.

At the end of the story, the narrator hears a beating heart that steadily gains volume, and which no one else seems to hear. The noise drives him to confess, if only to stop the sound. Though it may seem that the beating heart that he hears is the heart of the old man’s corpse underneath the floorboards, it is actually the narrator's own heartbeat. At the beginning of the story, the narrator claims to be over-sensitive, that he can hear and feel things that others can’t, or that at least are louder and more overwhelming for him. If the old man's heart had actually been beating so loudly underneath the floorboard, the policemen would have noticed it. Instead, it is only the narrator who seems to notice it getting louder and louder, and as it gets louder, he gets more and more agitated and frantic.  Even though it seemed as if he was fine and the police officers arriving just after he had dismembered a man didn’t affect him, the longer they stayed, the more nervous he became, and he wanted them gone he even explicitly says,“ Why would they not be gone? ”. Even further proof of the correlation between his increasing guilt and nerves and the beating heart is that the sentence right before the ringing starts in his ears, he states that,“ I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone”. His guilt over having killed and dismembered someone who he claimed to like, even love at the beginning of the story, is just too much for him to bear. The tell-tale heart in the story is not the old man’s, but in fact his own.