Edgar Allan Poe's Insanity

In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar Allan Poe revolves the story around a raving individual and the object in which he obsesses over. This theme of insanity is progressed throughout the entire story by Poe's style of gothic writing. Gothic-style writing is defined by using these elements: abnormal psychological behavior, creating a gloomy or threatening atmosphere, connections between the setting and its characters' thought processes or behavior, and supernatural components. Poe's usage of these gothic elements builds up the central theme in the "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Poe's major element of gothic literature, which establishes the main theme of insanity, is the use of abnormal psychological behavior. The narrator proves his insanity at the very
I smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done," (GB, pg. 76). By having the narrator smile after killing the old man, Poe creates a picture of a raving lunatic in the readers' mind. As the plot heightens, so does the narrator's dementia. Police officers arrive at the narrator's home shortly after he has finished disposing of the body. Feeling supercilious, the narrator invites them in to chat; sitting directly over the old man's dismembered body. Hearing what he thinks to be the old man's heartbeat, the narrator's nervousness grows while he is chatting with the police officers. Poe, once again, show's us the narrator's insanity through his resulting actions, "I foamed--I raved--I swore! I swung my chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards," (GB, pg. 77). The reader can really see the climax of the narrator's abnormal psyche when he actually thinks that the police officers can hear the beating heart too, "They heard!--they suspected!--they knew!--they were making a mockery of my horror!" (GB, pg. 78).

In "The
By having the eye torment the narrator until he viciously murders the old man, Poe is bringing a supernatural aspect into "The Tell-Tale Heart." The narrator's hatred for the old man's eye is unexplainable, and the narrator himself does not even know why he came up with the idea, "It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain," (GB, pg. 74). This eye almost possesses the narrator, becoming the driving force of his insanity. Another aspect of the supernatural at work in Poe's story is when the narrator hears the beating of the old man's heart in his own ears. It's obviously impossible to hear the beating in the intensity at which the narrator describes it, "the sound would be heard by a neighbor," (GB, pg. 76), but Poe adds this sentence to enhance the story's supernatural aspect. Right after the narrator killed the old man, he could still hear the heart beating, again this feat is impossible, "for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound," (GB, pg. 76). Even after the beating stopped, according to the narrator, it began again, once the police arrived. Poe makes it clear that the beating heart is not just the narrator listening to his own heart, or imagining the sound in his head, "until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears," (GB, pg. 77). An unexplainable noise that grows louder and louder can only be