Tell Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart is a very creepy, but well written short story. I enjoyed reading the story. It is told from a first person point of view in the past tense. The story starts off with the narrator trying to convince the reader that he is not crazy. That right there is sign of being crazy. If that is one of the very first things being said, it usually means he is crazy. People who have to declare that they are not crazy usually are. People who have to make that kind of disclaimer are what they claim not to be. He is also crazy because his reasoning for killing the old man he lives with is the old man’s “Evil Eye.” The narrator is very fixated on that eye. Crazy people are also fixated on one thing most of the time. The narrator even says that the old man was always kind to him, never insulting, and never did him any harm. The only thing that bothered him was the eye. The narrator only wants to kill the old man to get rid of the eye. It takes him eight days to go through with it because the first seven days the old man sleeps peacefully, but awakes on the eighth. This is when the narrator proceeds to end the man’s life. He can also be crazy because he hears the old man’s heart after he is dead. This leads him to confessing to killing the old man to the police. The narrator of the  story is definitely crazy.