The Tell-Tale Heart Response

"Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me." (Pg. 37)

I think that this quote by the narrator of the story is very significant. Quite possibly the biggest question in the story being: is the narrator mad? The narrator explains throughout the story that although his actions and thoughts must seem crazy, he is not. The narrator's major arguement being that madmen are unintelligent while he is in fact very clever and therefore, not mad at all. The narrator claims that all his workings throught the story were genius, even though from the point of veiw of the readers, all of his actions were rather simplistic. However, he himself is most likely the only one who thinks of himself as not mad, as the narrator's entire thoughts revolve around the old man's "vulture eye". Why the old man's eye brought such fear to the narrator is uncertain, but since he compares it to the eye of a vulture, commonly associated with death, then perhaps he felt threatened by the old man's eye.

The narrator's relationship to the old man is never laid out either, althought the most likely case would be that the narrator is a servant of the old man. The narrator claims that the old man was never cruel to him (as if it would have been acceptable for the old man to be so), nor was he interested in the old man's gold (hinting that the old man was rich).

Even if the narrator was mad, he was not mad enought not to think that he completely was not; at least he realized that what he was doing must have seemed mad. Three different kinds of insanity: when you do not know, when you know, or when you do not believe you are even though you acknowledge you must seem so(denial).