The Tell Tale Heart - How Effective do you find the Presence of Madness?

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Alice Heggie 11e/11g4

The Tell Tale Heart

How Effective do you find the Presence of Madness?

This story is in the first person narrative, and so instantly makes the events he is describing unreliable, as in a mad mans head things may be drastically different from reality. This also makes us question whether he is really insane as he seems to try to prove that he is not, so well, that we begin to believe him. And we also begin to feel almost sorry for the main character, not so much the old man, because we get to know more about him.

He constantly undermines himself, and the first instance of this is that he does not seem to actually want to kill the old man, as he tell us that he “loved the old man” and that the old man had “never wronged me”. Yet, he still commits the deed. He doesn’t seem to realise that what he has done is wrong, and has no concept of right and wrong, but he does know that he will be in trouble if anyone found out what he had done. This is why he takes such care in disposing of the body: He made certain that there was no blood splashed on the floor whilst he sliced the body into parts (another obvious sign of insanity) he used a bath to catch all of it, and placed the remains under the floorboards. Here he contradicts himself by saying “mad men no nothing” proving that he is mad, as one a person whose brain functioned properly would realise that after a few days under the floor boards a severed body will start to smell awful, and two “man men know nothing”, and he doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong, sort of like a child.

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In a way he is like a child, in the way he acts. Young children don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and also they don’t have a good concept of time, in relation to their young age. He says that “for a whole hour I did not move a muscle”, which to a normal human is pretty much impossible, so what he thought was an hour, could have been only a few minutes. Other evidence towards this is that throughout the whole “hour” he said that the old man was “sitting up in the bed, listening,” which is ...

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