The Tell-Tale Hearts Essay

Tell-Tale Hearts

By Andrea Basile

        Lunatic, crazy, cold, evil, shallow, horrible and gruesome. These are the words that describe the man in the story “The Tell-Tale Hearts”. This crazy man killed an innocent old man, not because he hated him but because he despised the old man’s eye. I believe that no sane person would do such an act.

          This foul man is insane, because he murdered an innocent person because of the eye! The eye that drove this man crazy, a pale blue eye that made the narrators blood run cold. He thought he needed it gone forever, so he decided to take the life of the old man. Crazy is the only word that describes him. The main character thought about killing the old man day and night and once the thought was in his head, it wouldn’t leave.

Since the thought wouldn’t leave his mind, every night at precisely midnight, he would open the bedroom door of the old man; it took him hours to open that door! This is one reason why he’s insane, he takes an hour opening a door so he can watch the old man sleep. How crazy is that? Then, ever so slowly, he puts in a dark lantern into the room and opens it enough that a single ray of light falls on the vulture eye. For seven nights the eye was closed so the evil man could not kill the old man because it was not the old man the vexed him, but his eye. For this reason he is troubled, because he is very willing to kill this man for his eye.

Besides the main character watching his victim sleep for seven nights, he also got furious and cold when he gazed upon the eye. Imagine this…would you kill an old man just because his eye creeps you out? No, probably not, therefore this is another reason why he’s crazy. It’s also crazy to get MAD when you look at an eye! Who in the world gets upset when you see an eye? My point exactly. Finally on the seventh night of watching the old man sleep, the eye was open! The narrator grew furious gazing upon it, and therefore he now had the motive to kill. He killed the old man, and here’s the crazy part, he didn’t even feel a pang of sadness or regret. All he was thinking was “I’m amazing! I rid myself from the eye forever! Nobody will ever know I killed him!” This is another reason why he is crazy, by feeling nothing once the old man was dead.

          Besides not feeling regret about the old man’s death, the narrator heard many things…he had advanced hearing and when he was about to kill the old man he heard the clock of death. No sane person would hear     “The hearkening death watches in the wall”. He thought he could literally hear death coming for the old man. He also heard the heart beat of the old man. Listening to his heart beat the narrator grew mad also!

          If hearing death isn’t enough, he is also crazy because after he killed the aged man, he still heard the heart beat of the DEAD man’s heart! Isn’t this enough evidence that he is crazy? It is not possible to hear a dead man’s heart beat, therefore his mind is wacko! So as you can see, the main character in the horrifying story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, in my opinion, is insane.