Tell-Tale Heart Character Study

The Narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” if a real person, and not a fictional protagonist of a story, would stand as testament to how insanity results in an extreme reliance on one’s own self, causing any reliance on logic or other people, to fly out the window. This clear picture of an insane man’s complete self-reliance is witnessed by the readers of the “Tell-Tale Heart”, as we see the narrator’s murder story unravel. We witness as the narrator tells of how he became more and more obsessed with an old man’s cloudy, pale blue eye. Off the bat, the unnamed narrator assumes automatically that while, we know nothing about him at all, we think he is insane. “TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (paragraph 1). The narrator’s assumption that we think he is mad, was clearly put in by Poe so the reader can see off the bat that the narrator does indeed have faulty logic and a paranoid disposition. What logical, non-delusion person would automatically try to argue that he is sane to people who don’t know a thing about him? The only explanation for this type of behavior is that he is paranoid that we might think he is mad, because he lacks the ability to logically pinpoint that it is almost impossible that we know anything about him before reading the story he tells (after all, his name is never even revealed.) In that same 3 line paragraph, he shows yet again that he is extremely self-reliant. He believes his nervousness gives him heightened sensory abilities. He in fact, believes he has such an acute sense of hearing that he can “...[hear] all things in the heaven and in the earth. [hear] many things in hell” (P 1). This line reveals again, his tiny grasp on logic. As Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”: “The world is the totality of facts in a logic-based system.” based on this, it can be argued that because the narrator has such