The short story can produce many different types of characters. Usually, these characters are faced with situations that give us an insight into their true character. In the Tell Tale Heart, a short story written by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator of the story is faced with a fear. He is afraid of the Old Man"s Eye. The actions that this narrator performs in order to quell his fear can lead others to believe that he suffers from some sort of mental illness. The very fact that this narrator is so repulsed by the old man"s eye, which he refers...
crime, believing that the police officer were aware of what he had done. This is the pinnacle of his paranoid state. The idea that the officers were just toying with him, that they knew all along that he had murdered, presents a clear case of paranoid psychosis. Despite the narrator"s cunning plan of how to commit the murder and how to dispose of the body, his own sub-conscience becomes his undoing. The sound of the old man"s heartbeat continues to taunt the narrator and his reaction to his subconscious thoughts causes him to admit his crime to the police.