The Tell Tale Heart Essays -- Poem Poetry Analysis Edgar Allen Poe Sym

In the â€Å"Tell-Tale Heart† by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator is extremely uncanny due to the reader’s inability to trust him. Right from the beggining the reader can tell that the narrator is crazy although the narrator does proclaim that he is sane. Since a person cannot trust a crazy person, the narrator himself is unreliable and therefore uncanny. Also as the story progress the narrator falls deeper and deeper into lunacy making him more and more unreliable, until the end of the story where the narrator gives in to his insanity, and the reader loses all ability to believe him. In the first lines of â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart†, the reader can tell that narrator is crazy, however the narrator claims the he is not crazy and is very much sane, because how could a crazy person come up with such a good plan. â€Å"How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observer how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story,† (Poe 74). The reader can see from this quote that narrator is claiming that he is not insane because he can tell anyone what happened without having a mental breakdown or any other problems that people associate with crazy people. This is the begging of the unreliability of the narrator. Here the reader is merely questioning the amount of details. The narrator then goes on to explain how he didn’t hate the old man but he hated his eye. Upon reading a little bit into the story the reader finds that the narrator likes the old man or rather doesn’t having anything against him, except for his eye. The pale blue eye was the focus point for his rage he hates but not the old man. How can anyone just hate someone’s eye without being mentally unstable? â€Å"I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a... ...o trust him at all. The reader cannot really believe that the narrator could hear the beating of the dead man’s heart. So they think and they might realize that it is one of the police men’s pocket watch, because earlier in the story the narrator describes a beating heart as a pocket watch wrapped in cotton. Now with narrator completely mad and his reader confused and dazed Poe ends his story to leave it filled with suspense. Thought the entire story there is a constant uncanny element, the unreliable narrator, and with it the questioning reader. In â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart† by Edgar Allan Poe, the reader is forced to think whether they should believe the ramblings of a crazy and unreliable narrator or not. This really brings out the uncanny in the story. Works Cited Poe, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe: The Gold-Bug and Other Tales. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1991.