爱伦坡《泄密的心》分析

The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”
This short fiction uses the first-person narration to tell us a horrible murder story. The narrator in the fiction is an unnamed killer who murdered the old man. While reading this fiction, I considered that this narrator is a good storyteller.
But in my opinion, he is an unreliable narrator and his not persuasive. “Here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart! ()" The narrator yelled in the end. How can a dead person have such a loud sound of heart beat? Obviously he is totally mad and only controlled by his fantasy. There are many descriptions out of reality except this one, so I think he is not a reliable narrator and his language is attractive but not persuasive.
I think the narrator has a neurotic personality, and he is a cruel psychopath. At the very beginning of the story, he said, “True! —nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”(). This sentence makes me uncomfortable, because such a weird atmosphere surrounds me and I don’t know what the mad narrator is going to do. I judge him as a person who has the neurotic personality, because he said he desired his eyes and didn’t care about his treasures (). He killed an old man just because the old man’s vulture eyes. The poor old man didn’t have some annoying behavior or some words can make the narrator really mad. This motive for murder is very ridiculous and seems unreasonable, and this makes contribution to let me verify that the narrator is a psychopath. It can’t be denied that he is a very careful killer. While walking into the old man’s room at the eighth night, he opened the lantern extremely careful and said “you cannot imagine how stealthily,
stealthily -- until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.”(). Exaggeration this description is, but it makes me notice the madman’s carefulness and cautiousness.
The narrator brought me into the scene and makes the story effective for me by his attractive and extraordinary language. In addition, his description is full of the details of the crime and filled with his own feelings and these made me felt very nervous while reading this novel. The narrator killed the old man with a strange motive, so I am wondering how his eyes made the narrator mad. Another question is, the narrator didn’t felt a little guilty and even have a pleasure after the murder, why his sense of guilt became so strong in the end? I think this can help me know more about the narrator.。