Followed by the context, the term paper includes a brief analysis of mad narrators in fiction. Furthermore, the historical and literary context of The Tell-Tale Heart contributes to the argumentation. Therefore, the beginning starts with a closer interpretation of the narrator’s character and their motives to plan the crime. This midterm paper focuses on the captivating effect of the autodiegetic narration and which significant differences would occur throughout The Tell-Tale Heart if the narrator would be outside the diegesis, not a part of the story world (also called heterodiegetic narration). Edgar Allan Poe wrote a deeply psychological short story whose purpose would fail to intrigue and fascinate the audience if it would have been written in a heterodiegetic narration.
The distance between the reader and the narrator becomes invisible and therefore nonexistent: the murder is not only committed by the protagonist but also by the reader. The role of the narrator is of major significance in the story: Due to the unreliability of the protagonist, the first-person narration (also called autodiegetic narration) is highly dubious. So what is merely imagination and what is truly genuine in The Tell-Tale Heart ? The protagonist, however, evidently cannot be trusted and appears more and more unreliable. It is the feeling of paranoia, surveillance and nervousness that ultimately leads to the crime.
After all, their insanity and madness result in the murder of the old man. Although the protagonist declares his sanity right in the beginning of the story, the reader before long learns about the evident mental illness of the narrator. The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart is perhaps the most striking feature of the short story.
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