Is the main character in “The Tell Tale Heart” static or dynamic?
I don’t think that his character deteriorates or changes as the tale goes on. He is the one TELLING the story, and he is crazy when he starts to tell us and he is just as crazy when he tells us the end. All through the story, however, he believes that he is perfectly sane. He believes it is perfectly reasonable, for example, to kill someone (even someone he believes he loves) because one of their eyes makes him feel uncomfortable. He also believes that the policemen at the end can hear the dead heart beating under the floorboards too – and thinks that they are just pretending that they don’t (to wind him up). He never admits the possibility that he might be mad – and in fact keeps reminding us that he is NOT mad. The most important thing about the mad narrator, though, is that we can’t trust him. He’s the perfect example of an ‘unreliable narrator’. Every time he tells us “I’m not mad”, we know that he is! So anything that he says, we have to think, “Is he really telling us the truth?
