"The Tell-Tale Heart" Analysis

The two big questions that Edgar Allen Poe leaves the reader with: Did the narrator really kill the old man that he claimed to have loved? Is the narrator actually a madman?

He (assuming the narrator is a man) starts off admitting that he is "nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous" but denies that he is crazy, much too defensively, in my opinion. He is determined to convince the reader of this, especially when he says that his condition "sharpened his senses, not destroyed, not dulled them", and when he explains that it was the old man's eye that drove him to kill the man, it made the murder seem even less reasonable.

The narrator goes into great detail of his meticulous actions that lead up to the murder. He emphasizes his patience and care when he gradually makes his way into the old man's room, watching him sleep for eight nights, each night at the same time. These details, however, are not descriptive in the appearance his surroundings, but more in the manner of how his actions are carried out. The murder itself is very simple and quick. He describes his "wise precautions" afterwards, when he hides the body beneath the floorboards of the old man's room. I believe the narrator mistakens his paranoia for cleverness and intellect. He has a distorted view of his surroundings, having multiple hallucinations in Poe's short story. At the very end it becomes very obvious that the narrator is quite indeed mad when he sits down with the police officers and beings to hear a faint ticking sound that grows louder and louder. He starts becoming agitated; he believes the ticking was coming from underneath them, from the dead-man's heart. Likely it was his own heartbeat he was hearing. He became violent; he wondered why the policemen could not hear what he was hearing. Finally he confesses by saying "'Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!--tear up the planks!--here, here!--it is the beating of his hideous heart!'"

Of course, the narrator being a madman, this could have possibly been a hallucination in itself. I like to think that Mr. Poe intended it to be that way, so the reader can decide for his/herself. Though the last line does somewhat imply that a man had died that night, the narrator's nervous self keeps truth a mystery, all the while Mr.Poe questioning what exactly IS sanity and what is not.