From the very first line of the story we can see that the sanity of the narrator is questionable. He says, “True! —nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am: but why will you say that I am mad?” His sanity is questioned from the very beginning. Then he goes on to describe the old mans “vulture” eye that eventually drives him to murder. This apparently is the only thing that drives him to do so.
When the narrator is the protagonist and tells the story from a personal account it makes the overall impact of the story more vivid. The narrator in this story is mentally challenged and adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing that he or she is not mad; He tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. He begins the story inquiring, "How then am I mad?" and states, "Observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story" (Paragraph 1). The narrator tries to prove how sane he really is before the reader has read enough to make any kind of judgment about him.
The narrator is only slightly upset by the fact that his brother is an invalid, but when confronted with the information that Doodle might be “not all there” his pride is absolutely destroyed. Therefore, his pride wins over, and the narrator sets out to kill Doodle and eliminate his embarrassment. However, love wins out in the end when Doodle smiles at the narrator and the narrator decides not to kill Doodle. This incident is given much meaning when Hurst writes, “Pride is a wonderful, terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death” (172). That quote is very powerful, as it not only explains the narrator’s ambitions to kill Doodle for his own pride, but also the entire scenario of Doodle becoming a regular person, followed by his death.
The old man, who is deceived by the narrator, and whom also trusts the narrator with his life, never suspects the him of this gruesome act. To the narrator, who is intrigued by the old mans evil eye, insanity foreshadows the olds man’s death, and symbolizes insanity in the narrator, and blindness in the old man. The eye in Poe’s short story is perceived upon its negatives, reflecting the way many people of the time thought and observed things. Owen Meredith’s view on an eye is very much like how people think of an eye today; something beautiful. In todays world people understand an eye to be a gift, something that is used a lot, a open eye to success, a tool to help take a view on your life and finally can symbolize the presence of an individual in
His swift action is also seen as an admirable trait as he sends Creon off to the Delphic oracle to find out the cause of the plague immediately. As a result the audience are automatically inclined to grow a liking towards Oedipus, as he shows the quality of a pious/dutiful man. However Oedipus’ strengths, unwillingly becomes his weaknesses when his hamartia becomes evident; his lack of information about his identity. Oedipus’ intelligence and assertiveness holds no match against the paramount nature of fate. His insults of Tiresias’ and his blindness, accusation of both Creon and Tiresias plotting against him, and the vicious handling of the old shepherd to extort information from him show his complete frustration in his determination to find the truth.
In Kafka’s short story “In The Penal Colony”, The Officer is the judge of the colony and punishes men who may or may not be considered guilty by more humane men. He takes the ultimate sacrifice in the end when he realizes that he is the one who should be punished and he uses the machine—that he used to worship—to kill himself. The two villains are similar in the fact that they both murder people for unjustifiable reasons, however, they differ when it comes to morals and confidence. Captain Torres kills rebels whether they did anything or not. He doe not care about their intentions as he states that all the rebels will be punished (p.443).
Instead of showing any guilt, Rainsford actually seems to be more at peace after he pulls the trigger. In the book it says, “He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided.” The second distinction among the two stories is the motivation behind each murder that occurred. In the “Tell-Tale Heart” the murder of the old man was pre-meditated and was brought upon by self motivation. He says, “To think that there I was opening the door little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts.” This clearly showed that he was having thoughts of taking this man’s life. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” Rainsford kills the General out of pure self-defense.
In spite of his strong beliefs in the beginning of the story, Jack’s views begin to change in chapter eight after he informs Judge Irwin of the “dirt” he has on him. He believes that informing Irwin will benefit the judge by giving him a chance to defend himself. Unfortunately, after Judge Irwin kills himself Jack realizes that the awareness he believed would be beneficial to the judge became the motivation for his suicide. Following this event, Jack comes to understand that neither innocence nor awareness is always blissful. This transformation becomes especially obvious to the reader in the last chapter when Jack lies to his mother, telling her that Judge Irwin did not kill himself because he was “in a jam”.
A comparison between A Tell-Tale Heart and American Psycho Introduction A Tell-Tale heart is about a man and his urge to kill another man. American Psycho is about a man and his urge to kill other people. The two protagonists are both insane and dealing with a comprehensive problem. There is one slight distinction between them; Patrick Bateman's victims are in plural, the narrator in A Tell-Tale Heart's victim is in singular. Bateman kills people for his own satisfaction, the nameless narrator does it because of his urge to get rid of an eye.
The narrator speaks directly to the reader and opens the story by claiming that he is “dreadfully nervous” but not mad. He also maintains that he has sharpened senses due to his disease especially an abnormally acute hearing. He then tells a story to defend his plea of sanity by confessing to a murder of an old man - which basically contradicts and defeats his argument. He explains that his motivation to eradicate the old man’s existence is neither passion nor desire for the man’s possessions but rather the fear of the old man’s pale blue, vulture-like eye. He insists that he is not a madman for he carried out his scheme artfully like a criminal mastermind.