Edgar Alan Poe

If one were to say that Edgar Allan Poe is a good writer, he or she is making an understatement of his work. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of all time. His stories have put him in a category of notoriety that also includes, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, and Earnest Hemingway, just to name a few. He is most widely known for his unique obsessively dark, or gothic horror stories. To many Poe is considered to be the “grandfather” of present- day horror. Most of Poe’s short stories revolve around death, gloom and the mental state of his main character/characters. More often than not, the main character of his stories is often thought to have a certain degree of insanity. In the story “The Tell- Tale Heart,” some believe it is the narrator’s insanity that causes him to dismember the old man into several pieces and place him under the floorboards; while other’s question whether or not the main character was really insane or it if was simply a ploy to be dismissed of all charges once he was brought to stand trial. Given the time period in which the piece was written, in order for one to be able to come to a plausible conclusion concerning the mental health of the unnamed narrator one must know the medical definition of insanity, the legal terms to be declared insane, and compare the definition and legal terms of insanity to the state of the narrator in the story.
The term “insanity” is a term that was coined by the legal system.   In the medical world, insane or insanity is not a diagnosis that is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). What is diagnosed in the DSM are various mental problems that can cause an individual’s behavior to change, sometimes leading them to commit a crime depending on their diagnosed mental illness. Based upon the evidence provided by the narrator in the story, one can conclude that the narrator is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. According to... [continues]

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