Imagine you are so frightened that you start to sweat like crazy and every little thing seems to expand. This is exactly how the murderer felt in the book ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. In America and many states, we have a justice system to punish the guilty and serve the greater good, but has it always been for the greater good? Since the 1800s, we have established a criminal justice system, but in certain situations, many individuals are involved with greater evil. Our procedures of maintaining equality and justice, yet we punish victims as well without a thought of other vulnerable individuals that are unassociated with us. We believe that locking up mentally ill persons helps solve the problem, but in reality, their emotions build up, making it worse. Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is one of many instances in which point the mind takes over a man that becomes a helpless victim. Poe addresses throughout the story his assertion that he is one of the countless victims, including the old man. Due to the scarcity of mental health awareness and help, this causes people to fight this evil by themselves and to be put in solitary.
The murderer is innocent because of insanity because he is mentally ill. Because he suffered from anxiety, his motives were based on a disconnect from reality. In agreement with Mayo Clinic, anxiety is when the human body starts to panic, has an irregular heartbeat, and excessive sweating. Furthermore, it is our own responsibility to ease any pain no man or woman should feel. Without a doubt, the narrator tolerates this persistent fear he is living in, and he states: “True – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! But why will you say that I am mad?”. Therefore, his anxiety causes him to tell this tale. The narrator is not thinking straight and is not rational about the way he processes his thoughts and actions. Thus, he clearly knew what he was doing but he was not in the right mindset.
Primarily, the narrator who has been hallucinating, did not have a full understanding of reality. He said in his own words: “I heard all things in heaven and on earth. I heard many things in hell”. Correspondingly, he had this thought that the old man’s eye was haunting him and he needed to get rid of it. He claimed that it was ‘evil’, proving that he has been having some time of hallucinations for a while or just now that he saw the old man. The narrator believes that he is the chosen one and that he has some sort of connection with heaven and hell. With this evidence, it proves that he is following some type of order, “the gods sent him” to complete this mission. In addition, his motive for killing the old man was not only the ‘evil’ eye, but his delusions. Moments before he excruciatingly kills, he was in some way obligated to eliminate the eye, he states: “Open – wide, wide, open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones”. To back up my reasoning, initially, the madman had come up with this thought, this idea to suspect a helpless poor old man’s eye was haunting him, seeking ‘power’. The textual evidence only proves that he is obsessing over the old man’s, eye even though it did not do anything to him. Moreover, he mentions that “it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye”, finding it ‘impossible’ to kill the old man without first seeing his eye. He was experiencing a recalcitrant impulse, “which led to the old man’s untimely death”. It’s immensely captivating the approach he took to isolate the ‘evil eye’ from the old man. Confining this individual is like throwing an ill dog in a penitentiary and asserting that it killed a human being, unquestionably the only thing it’s guilty of is striving these phantasmagorias alone.
Above all, his actions cause him to believe that he is more prominent than everyone else and that he is distinctive from everyone else. He states: “Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers—of my sagacity”. He actually believes he has ‘powers’, and because of this his inability to control himself. His schizophrenia is believing that the people around you, like the old man, have a ‘secret identity’, and you need to stop them from harming you. The narrator thinks that he is the good guy and undeniably has accepted that this illness has endowed this ‘greater power’ to him. This man, living in fear, cannot fixate on the urge to confess the crime, even though at the beginning of the story he stated: “The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them”. The intensity of his schizophrenia leads him to the assassination of the old man. And throughout the story, he starts getting this title, the unidentified man was only named ‘The Madman, assuming that he is deranged, ill, and not needed. Above all, right before he killed the man he stopped – he froze. “And now a new anxiety seized me – the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man’s hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room…the heartbeat on with a muffled sound”. With all his plans for eight days, it has all come to an end, he is so precise and plans of getting rid of this eye, but when his anxiety, his schizophrenia built up more and more, he got so scared he just stopped right there. Another victim is caught in this diabolical net of torment and has no clue that he was in it. It’s hard to fight something independently, especially a disease, and most of the time people don’t try to understand what they’re going through. If a human being is going through and living the torment of this condition, of course, they are going to feel pain and sorrow. Everyone acts, feels, and thinks differently, so there’s no way to understand a person’s actions or feelings without sitting down and asking.
While others may argue that he was insane, he knew what he was doing. He shows awareness of his actions. His actions were on behalf of the affliction he did this all because of his schizophrenia.
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