Tell tale heart Ronald Reagan once said “I am not smart enough to lie.” Lies require a person to be extremely meticulous in fashion. One lie starts a chain reaction leading to more and more lies, and sometimes a different lie for a different person. It is like lying about an alibi in court. In order to stick to the alibi, more and more lies form, and eventually the lawyer finds things that do not match add up. Keeping all of the lies straight is so hard that mistakes are inevitable. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe shows that lying and covering up the truth is essentially impossible unless that person bares no conscience.     In one way or another, whether it be on a conscious or unconscious level, people tend to betray themselves. Even the old man
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lied to himself in order to calm down, but eventually the truth caught up to him. As the narrator sat quietly in the room after he accidentally made a clamor, he thought of what the old man was thinking, and he said, “He had been saying to himself-‘It is nothing but the wind in the chimney-it is only a mouse crossing the floor,’ or ‘it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp’” (Poe 577). The old man was trying to convince himself that the racket he heard was nothing but the wind or a mouse. There was ...

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