The Tell-Tale Heart: Unreliable Narrator

The Unreliable Narrator
The narrator in Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a psychotic murderer who kills an older man who lives with him. He tells us his entire story very “calmly” as if murder is a casual thing. He kills the older man and buries him under the planks. Later, he confesses to some officers of the murder because of the loud heartbeats of the man’s heart, in which symbolizes the narrator’s conscious. The way the narrator told his story is unreliable because he is not sane, he is uneasy and paranoid, and he is confused about what he really feels and thinks.
Firstly, one reason the narrator is unreliable is because of his insanity. Many times throughout the story he claims he is not insane, yet why would a person have to prove their saneness? Everytime he does something an insane person would do, he refers to it as being wise, “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing.”(36) His saneness leads him to believe he has so called powers, “…...