In the short story, The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Alan Poe a caretaker for an old man decides to kill the man he works for. He doesn’t do it because he hates the elderly fellow, he does it because of one distinct characteristic. His eye.

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

The caretaker takes his time to do the deed. It took him eight nights to ready himself. Once he was ready he flipped the bed the old man was on upside down: crushing the man. He then dismantles the body and places the remains underneath the floor boards. Later on in the evening, police officers show up to investigate the scene because of a heard scream. At first the caretaker was comfortable with having the officers there, but while they were there he started to hear something coming from underneath the floorboards. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. He then grew to feel extremely guilty about what he did, and began to lose his sanity. With his new unstable mind, he turned himself into the police.

    Literature can be a tricky thing to understand. The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Alan Poe, makes you think and feel what the characters are thinking and feeling, and in the eyes of someone who is literally insane; that is something tough to understand. While reading The Tell Tale Heart I almost felt as if my brain was being tossed around and molded into the absolutely insane point of view that Edgar Alan Poe wants you to see and experience. Having your mind change points of view like that can be hard (it gave me a headache), but like many things that don’t make sense in life; you just have to make sense of it. In choosing what short story to read I thought I should just go with the shortest of the short stories. At first, I read a different short story called A&P, but that story made little to no sense to me and I didn’t think I could break it down enough for an essay, so I chose the shortest story there was—The Tell Tale Heart. Before reading this flash fiction piece I thought it would be a quick and easy read, but I had something else waiting for me. This book was filled with a complex plot and tough morals to understand, and while reading this story I was thinking to myself, “Why on earth is this caretaker killing his employer because his eye freaks him out?” To be honest I still don’t have an answer for that other than the main character is a lunatic. It was a difficult piece to wrap my head around, but eventually the complexity of the story became more simple to understand and I understood what to literature was about. This story focused a lot on what can drive someone to insanity—the big reason that the author focused on was guilt. The protagonist (the maniac) ended up killing the old man just because the old man’s eye freaked him out. He ended up regretting this and it ended up driving him into insanity. Personally, I felt bad for the old man; he didn’t treat the caretaker bad, he just happened to have an eye that freaked someone out he really just didn’t deserve it. I also felt that mind was being warped throughout the last page of the story; it felt like mind mind was stripped of everything I knew and I was placed into the murderer’s mind. The challenge of trying to understand what was going through another person’s mind— and a crazy one at that—is extremely demanding of someone’s mind flexibility. Overall I liked the reading, and wouldn’t mind doing a few more.

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