Your Mind is the Enemy

Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart is about an unnamed narrator who claims that he is nervous not mad.  The narrator claims to defend his sanity but in reality he talks about killing an old man. The narrator claims that he is not a mad man but his actions in the story clearly define him as a crazy man. Edgar Allen Poe uses his word choice to write a story that is full of paranoia and mental deterioration. The story illuminates the psychological contradictions that contribute to a murderous profile, but in the end his own paranoia leads to the downfall of himself.

An important theme in this story is the tension between love and hate. Edgar Allen Poe is an author who writes about the dark side of a psychological mystery. We learn in the story that people tend to harm the things they love because of their own sanity. A crucial part of the story is when the narrator wants to separate the man from his “Evil Eye” so that he can spare burden of guilt. "'Villains!' I shrieked, 'dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!'" (229). This quote shows the narrator’s tension between love and hate. The narrator clearly admits his crime because he hears an innocent heart beating underneath the floor. This is important because he knows that he has committed a crime and his mind is telling him that he will be caught for his dreadful actions. In the story the narrator states that, "True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" (228). The narrator is nervous for his actions but does not know why his own mind is mad at him. The narrator’s desire to separate the eye from the old man is what motivated the murder. The feeling of hatred made him kill the old man for his eye but his feeling of love is what led to his downfall because he revealed his actions.

Everything is fair when it comes to love and hate. Sometimes your psychological mind makes you do dark things, but those dark actions can sometimes lead to your downfall. By diminishing the old man’s humanity, the narrator felt guilty for his actions and his own mind turned against himself and forced him to confess. The mind can play tricky games when it comes to love and hate, but in the end paranoia will lead to your downfall when you least expect it.