matt09,
Edgar Allen Poe's quintessential unreliable protagonist narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is quite disturbed. The sharp exclamations, nervous questions, and broken sentences almost too blatantly advertise Poe’s conscious intention; the protagonist’s insanity, delusional reality, and painful insistence in ‘‘proving’’ himself sane only serves to intensify the idea of his madness.
Poe presides with precision of perception at the psychological drama he describes. He makes us understand that the voluble murderer has been tortured by the nightmarish terrors he attributes to his victim: ‘‘He was sitting up in bed listening;—just as I have done, night after night, harkening to the death watches in the wall’’; further, the narrator interprets the old man’s groan in terms of his own persistent anguish: ‘‘Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me.’’
Thus, Poe, in allowing his narrator to disburden himself of his tale, skillfully contrives to show also that he lives in a haunted and eerie world of his own demented making.
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