Tell Tale Heart

An "Evil Eye" would drive anyone crazy

Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how one characters imagination is capable of being so animated that it completely takes over a persons life. The display of the narrator’s imagination unconsciously planted seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an uncontrollable situation for which there is no room for reason and which end up in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator’s comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lent itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death benefit the narrator financially. The narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator’s obsession with the old man’s eye leads to his downfall as he is overwhelmed with internal conflict and his shift of emotion from confidence to guilt.
A critic once said, "The Tell-Tale Heart is one of the most effective parables ever conceived." (Ward)   The fixation on the old man’s vulture-like eye forces the narrator to devise a plan to eliminate the old man. The narrator confesses the sole reason for killing the old man is his eye: "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees   very gradually   I made up my mind to rid myself of the eye for ever" ( Poe 34). The narrator begins his tale of deception by trying to convince the reader he is not insane, but the reader quickly gains the idea that the narrator is indeed out of control. The fact that the old man’s eye is the only motivation to murder proves the narrator is so mentally unstable that he must have a reason to kill. In his mind, he rationalizes murder with his own irrational fear of the eye.
The narrator wrestles with conflicting feelings of responsibility to the old man and feelings of eliminating the man’s "Evil Eye" (Poe 34). "Neither does the narrator explain how or...