g." He does this for eight nights before killing the old man. To portray the methodicalness of a madman is not the work of a madman, but of a man who understands what it is to be mad. Are you considered mad because you understand what it is to be mad? Good question, No? After he killed the old man, he methodically dismembered him and buried the parts beneath the floorboards. His methodicalness in doing so seems very "detached." By that, I mean he seemed to be outside of himself in order to complete his mission in what seemed to be steps that were quite easy for him to accomplish. When the police came to question him, he was initially fine. Easy going. No problem. No sweat. But then! What sound was that? A beating of a heart? He hears the beating of a heart growing louder and Louder and LOUDER! OH MY! He confesses! The methodical "detached" killer is unwillingly outwitted by the sound of a beating heart that is detached! The man "detaches" himself from the task of dismembering the body, and the heart that gives him away was "detached" from its body, and the "detachment" of both is the end of the tale! How ironic! How positively Poe! I heard a quote on Poe once and wrote it down as I liked it so much, but I failed to get the author's name. In it he said; "He has created a universe, given it psychological laws without denying the existence of the moral law, and peopled it with characters appropriate to such a universe. Putting overt mortality out of bounds helps to give him uniqueness. Even though Poe is often looked upon as a gifted psychopath who is describing with consummate artistry his personal instabilities and abnormalities, the fact remains that his superiority is more than a matter of art. There is a violent realism in his macabre writings unequaled by the Americans who worked in the same genre."Although I could neither prove or disprove the sanity of the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, it was fun to point out a few things in a...
