The Tell-Tale Heart

Just as the day turns to dark; the lunatic that controls you every night is coming back to greet you once more. Thank goodness no one knows this because it would just be a waste of your breath when you try to explain that you’re not crazy. That there’s just a crazy evil spirit that comes and takes over your body and mind completely. Absolutely no one, sometimes even you don’t believe yourself that there are voices telling you to hurt the ones you love most. This is exactly what happen to the butler in Edger Allen Poe’s A Tell-Tale Heart, who just happened to go crazy and kill the old man that he looked after. In the short story the butler is always saying that he was not crazy, that he was in fact smart, but actually he is just highly unintelligent and out of his mind.
“I heard all things in the heaven above and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” How then is he mad? Ask the butler, why most would say he is insane in many ways, most would say how is he not mad? Edger Allen Poe himself, most likely made this character knowing that he was indeed crazy. If this butler was truly normal then why was he hearing voices in heaven and hell, why was he hearing voices that weren’t even there? And why did he stalk the evil eyed man every night? Anyone who does those things is obviously insane; even though there isn’t such thing as normal people in this world, there are smart ones that know when enough is enough and when they need to go see a psychologist.
Which is another thing that was wrong with the care taker, he did not know when enough was enough obviously. He did not see that the evil eye was just a plain bad eye, in fact the butler was so wrapped up in taking the eye out and killing the old man, to notice that he indeed was so far out of his mind that he couldn’t think of anything else to do day and night then to obsess over this one little eye. Also the butler puts himself too much into the action instead of looking at it from a bird’s eye view.
The butler could have easily found a nice, fast, and simple way to kill the old man and get on with his own life. If the butler had thought his plan to kill the old man through he could have made it look like the man died of old age. First he could have snuck into the room and right when the old man knew he was there….BAM! he flips the mattress over on the floor suffocating the old man. For the next step instead of slicing and dicing the poor old man, just put him and his mattress back almost perfectly back the way he found it. Finally for the last step in the process, leave the old man and go call the ambulance in the morning not too soon or else you might look guilty and never too late because then people will start to jump to conclusions very quickly.
In the end the butler turned out to be just as dumb as he was crazy. If he had thought his plan through for a while more he probably would have had more success, or even if he had sought out help a little bit earlier he would have never got to the breaking point where he felt as if the only way to stop the evil eye was to destroy it. He could have even asked the old man politely to cover the eye because it was rather disturbing, but no he just had to have his way which didn’t quite work out for him after all.