The Tell-Tale Heart In the "Tell-Tale Heart", Edgar Allen Poe examines themes of sanity vs. madness through and violence, mental imagery and confusion as well as repetition of thoughts for emphasis. The narrator possesses several qualities of mental instability that lead to his horrible crimes- nervousness, delusions of grandeur, violence and auditory hallucinations. These features of mental instability are repeated numerous times through out this story, one of Poe's shortest works. The first and perhaps …showed first 75 words of 1822 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1822 total…unstable. Ironically, as noted throughout, the greatest indication of insanity is the narrator's attempts to prove his mental stability. As aptly discussed by Robinson, "Since such processes of reasoning tend to convict the speaker of madness, it does not seem out of keeping that he is driven to confession by "hearing" reverberations of the still-beating heart of the corpse he has dismembered, nor that he appears unaware of the irrationalities in his defense of rationality."