Is The Narrator Insane

“Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe). The unnamed first-person narrator begins by attempting to prove his sanity while confessing to killing an old man. The narrator admits that “he doesn’t recall how the idea entered his brain but it haunted him day and night” (Poe). Insane can be defined as an action or quality characterized or caused by madness. I believe that the unnamed narrator is very much insane. “He had the eye of a vulture. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold” (Poe). Nobody in their right state of mind would kill an elderly man because of an eye! The narrator believed that by killing the old man he could rid himself of the eye forever. At this point in the story we really see just how insane and mentally disturbed the narrator really is. “And this I did for seven long nights – every night just at midnight – but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (Poe). Here the narrator is once again showing just how insane he is. For seven nights in a row the narrator spends an hour just to stick his head in the old man’s door and watch him. Each morning he would speak to
“And now a new anxiety seized me – the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man’s hour had come” (Poe). Here’s proof of insanity once again. There’s no way a sane person would believe that a neighbor could hear the sound of their next door neighbor heartbeat. At that exact moment the narrator leaps into the old man room, drags him onto the floor and pull the heavy bed over him, instantly killing the old man. The narrator then states, “His eye would trouble me no more” (Poe). The narrator finishes his job by dismembering the old man’s body and dispose of them under the floor planks of the old man’s