Tell Tale Heart

Insane or Not Insane

Would you consider a man who took one hour to look through a doorway sane or insane? How about that he strangled a man with a hay pillow, then cut him up in a bath tub, opened up the floor boards, and put the cut up body under the floor boards and did not think about the smell, sane or insane? The short story “The Tell Tale Heart” was a great story explaining that when you find something weird about a person you will not forget about it and want to make it go away and will go to any precautions to make it go way.

In the short story “The Tell Tale Heart” a crazy man checks on an old man every night. He is making sure that he sleeps well during his last week of living. The reason for him wanting to kill the man is his eye because it looks like an eagle’s eye and he wants to get rid of it. On the night of the killing he walks into his bedroom and suffocates him with the old man’s mattress. After the man was dead he cut him up in a bath tub and hid the cut up body parts under the floor boards. Then the cops came to his house due to noise complaints. When the man showed the police the old man’s bedroom he heard a heartbeat. Although the old man was dead, he freaked out and told the cops that the dead man was under the floor boards. The man did not think that he was crazy and even stated that in the story repeatedly saying that he was not crazy. Many things in the real world relate to this story, not in the cut up body part but the people being crazy but not thinking that they are actually crazy.

I can relate to this story in having an experience that makes you feel crazy. When I was at Tae-Kwon-Do, someone from the Pewaukee Tae-Kwon-Do school showed me a video about two guys sparring. At first I thought she was just showing me the video to show me how I can improve in sparring. However, when the match started, it looked like something was going to go wrong. After one or two minutes into the match one of the guys looked like he was going to pass out. The other guy kicks the guy that looks like he was going to pass out and the guy falls to the ground and is knocked out. Then the attacker continued to kicked him in the head about ten times more before the referee came in and pushed him away. He was screaming at the knocked out guy as if he did something wrong. Even though things that I can relate to are important so are stories in the news.

On July 22, 2011 Anders Breivik set of a bomb in Oslo killing seven people right after he did that he went to an island off of Norway and started shooting children. He killed 87 kids in 90 minutes. The reason for this is that he was anti-government. Anders Breivik was dressed in a police outfit and told the kids that they would be okay. When the kids would come over to him he would kill them all. About 600 kids went to the camp. A better perspective of this is that he killed about 14% of the camp. Breivik did not think he was crazy at all even though he dressed in a police officer outfit and killed 87 children. Over all he killed a total of 94 kids. Crazy people aren’t always in real life people as act crazy in many different movies like the movie Cast Away.

The movie Cast Away is very similar to this story. In the movie, Tom Hanks Is stranded on an island and after a while he goes crazy. He accidentally cut his hand and threw a white volley ball at a tree. A little while later he picked up the ball and saw that there was a red hand print on the ball. Tom Hanks made a face on the blood stained ball and named it Wilson. Wilson was his friend for the rest of the movie. Later in the movie he started to get into arguments with his volley ball Wilson. At one point, he was going to hang himself off the top of a cliff and he used an “idol” that was his weight to see if it could hold him. When the rope snapped he decided not to try to kill himself. Later, when he was making his raft, he found the rope and used it to help build the raft.

In all of the stories mentioned, the common theme is that when something extreme or violent happens to a person, the memory of it stays with them for a very long time and can even make a person feel crazy. After thinking about how different people handle things differently, I think the man from the “Tell Tale Heart” was definitely insane even though he thought he was normal. Some people just handle tough situations differently.