Indledning
Throughout history the psychopath has creeped out even the toughest people. But how can one mad person scare more people than for example a pack of werewolves? Perhaps because the psychopath does not give the reader any signs of abnormality, does not prepare the reader on the danger that is to come. He – or she – does not have large sharpened teeth, or a hideous look.
No, the psychopath looks just like another regular person with a job to take care of and friends to see.
The psychopath seems like any other ordinary person until he unexpectedly act out of sheer malice. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the unnamed narrator has done one of these malicious acts, and he explains in details how he killed an innocent older man because of the old man ́s eye, while he throughout the story tries to convince the reader about his sanity.
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Uddrag
The story is told by the still nameless narrator with a first person point of view, and the narrator is unreliable, just like in all of Allan Poe ́s other stories. The main reason for the unreliability is the motive that the narrator has for keeping information from the reader.
He tries with all of his effort to convince the reader that he is not mad, and to do that, he chooses what to tell and what to keep for himself.
In the first paragraph, he explains how he will make the reader sure of his sanity, and therefore there is good reason to believe that the narrator gives the reader the information he thinks will help to prove his cause, and that he for this reason refrains from the kind of information he thinks will do the opposite. (p. 27, l.l. 4-8)
The fact that the whole story is the narrator telling how he killed an old man due to an old man ́s eye, makes it obvious that the narrator is not to be trusted.
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