The Tell-Tale Heart of Edgar Allan Poe-Commentary-In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the action is filtered through the eyes of a delusional narrator. The narrator fixes on the old man's eye and decides to commit a conscious act of murder. He prides himself on his careful planning and mastery of deceiving others. While he is friendly towards the old man and the police, dark secrets are hidden deep within him. This leads to false confidence. He insists that the police sit in the same room where he had killed the old man a few hours before. The old man's body was revealed to be under the floorboards, by the narrator's own admission, and he admits his crime due to the policeman's loud knocks. heart. The narrator's fate is unclear, although it is likely that he too faces execution or certainly some sort of heavy punishment for what he has done. Perhaps he was committed to an insane asylum, which would explain his constant need to declare that he is not crazy; he does not show remorse for his crime, but rather expresses a feeling of joy that the old man was murdered, coupled with a new sense of defeat since the heartbeat continues to torment him. Its presence affirms the narrator's madness, that his fears are not of supernatural origin, but rather internalized conditions in his own mind. The narrator's strict refusal to acknowledge this clearly reveals the unresolved problem at the heart of the story. It is likely that the heartbeat that the narrator hears all around him in the outside world is actually the beat of his own heart. Thus, he projects internal struggles onto the world around him. He kills the old man, shouts at the policemen and begs for the heartbeat...... middle of paper ......, the narrator can still hear the heartbeat, in "and now!-- Again!" suggesting that the old man's murder did not ultimately solve his problem. He had thought that the old man's eye would leave him alone once killed, but now the old man's heart is consuming him, and he is also not capable of murdering the old man to solve this problem because the old man man is already dead! Because it is not possible for a heart to beat when the body it inhabits has been cut and drained of much blood, nor is it possible to hear the beating of the heart of someone else from afar, it should be clear that the narrator is a madman after all, and his worries, his fears and his paranoia which he directs towards the old man and even the police, are in fact quite inside his head. While trying so determinedly to assert his sanity, the narrator managed to reveal that he really is crazy..