The narrator is a complex character in this story. He is a mysterious man of abnormal character. It is very difficult to understand his hidden motives. It seems that he is a sufferer of a kind of mental illness. He has a craze of homicide. It seems that he is very wise and skilled culprit. He takes every step of his strategy very cautiously. He has not any vices of common man. He is not greedy and he has not any kind of enmity with the old man. He is a man of good behaviour but he has double layer of complexity in his mind.
Inwardly he tries his best to kill the old man; outwardly he shows his good behaviour and courtesy with the old man. He is very skillful and careful person in his profession. He completes his mission without sleeping up to 8 nights. It shows his sincerity, devotion to work. He is a man of strong determination. Once he is determined, he completes it at any rate. It means he is a man of fixed idea and hard decision. He knows how to use the word net. He entraps the police officers in his word net. On the other hand, he is very argumentative and logical. He takes every step phase-by-phase logically providing certain reasons. He is a man of extra-ordinary mind. He has a long vision also. He thinks very deeply and acts as if he is a veteran criminal. So, in short, we may say that the narrator is clever, shrewd, cunning, sincere, hard decision maker, a man of strong determination and a brave person ready to fulfill his mission. Except his drawback of unstoppable want to kill, he is a genial, amicable and good-natured, simple person.
Justify the title “The Tell Tale Heart”.
A tale tell heart is one which reveals or indicates something covert or concealed. The narrator seems to have very sensitive ears because when he entered the old man’s room to kill him his ears hear a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. The sound was possibly of the watch the old man was wearing or alternatively, the sound of the watch beetle that is known to surround a dying body. But for the narrator it was the old man’s heart. He was excited to uncontrollable terror and finally, dragging the old man to the floor, kills him. He even places his hand over the heart, which didn’t pulsate. Any way after he kills the old man that night, he dismembers body parts, and places them under the floorboards. Meanwhile, the policemen – they have arrived at the old man’s house upon receiving information – sit on the chairs placed for them, and talk with each other. The sound of the beating heart starts growing on him again. This must have happened as he must have forgotten to remove the watch off the old man’s hand or the watch beetle may have continued buzzing. But with each passing moment, the narrator’s mental equilibrium takes a nasty turn. In his mental fit, he believes the sound reaching his ears was the beating of the dead old man’s heart. Now unable to control the continuous sound, he confesses of the murder. It was the supposed beating of the dead heart that led to the revelation of the crime. Thus, the title of the story is justified.
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