The narrator's general attitude of fear and paranoia is suggested by the first lines of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. He opens his narrative by stating:
TRUE! —nervous —very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
This tells us two things, first that he is nervous and fearful, and second that among the things he fears is being thought insane.
The next thing the...
The narrator's general attitude of fear and paranoia is suggested by the first lines of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. He opens his narrative by stating:
TRUE! —nervous —very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
This tells us two things, first that he is nervous and fearful, and second that among the things he fears is being thought insane.
The next thing the narrator fears is the old man's eye. Strangely—this narrator is crazy after all—he does not fear the old man himself, who is harmless and with whom he has an apparently friendly relationship. The narrator says of the eye: "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold."
The narrator is also portrayed as abnormally sensitive to sound and prone to frightening auditory hallucinations. Even when the old man is sleeping, the narrator imagines that he can hear the sound of the old man's heart from across the room, and thinks:
And now a new anxiety seized me—the sound would be heard by a neighbour!
This anxiety about the sound of the heart continues even after the old man is dead and dismembered. The narrator still thinks he can hear a beating heart, and the sound terrifies him.
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