"You fancy me mad? Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded-with what caution-with what foresight-with what dissimulation I went to work!...It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha!-would a madman have been so wise as this?"(pg. 193)
"If still you think me mad, wou will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs."(pg. 196)
I find these two quotes taken from "The Tell-Tale Heart" to be especially interesting. It is interesting to see how this obviously mad man continued to insist he was not mad. To him, he had perfect logic in killing the harmless, innocent old man. It was the old man's eye that resembled a vulture's eye which the mad man could not stand. He created his own logic behind murdering the old man. The thought process we can see through Poe's interpretation of this man's thinking makes me wonder about sanity. I often have caught myself wondering if I would know if I were insane or not. Would I be able to distinguish between being insane or sane? Also, what exactly is sanity? I often wonder if someone who is insane is just another way of saying that they are different. If the whole world was insane but I was the only sane one, would I not be labeled insane? I think I probably would be simply because I was not like the rest of the world. Perhaps an insane person is someone who thinks differently but the result of their different thinking is hurting somebody else. Let's face it, if the man in "The Tell-Tale Heart" would have just suppressed his hatred for the old man's eye and not killed him, then probably nobody would ever had caught his insanity.
During our facilitation, I posed the question whether or not you would be able to recognize you were insane and needed help. Somebody answered back saying that if your questioning your sanity, then you are most likely sane. However, that answer really made me think about this man who kills the old man with the vulture's eye. He is constantly giving reasons as to why he is not insane when very clearly he is insane.(to be continued)
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I like where you are going with this - I have done a paper on this before and I really think that he throughout the text knows he is insane and is trying to rationalize it to a sane action. Some read it at a confession, but I read it as him trying to convince himself that he is sane while he clearly knows that he is not. If he really thought he was sane he would not have to jusitfy anything!
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