Already from the introduction, from the punctuation alone used, the reader is put on their guard about the story that follows and already begins to question the sanity of the narrator. As we read on, the narrator endeavors further to convince the readers of his sanity by "calmly- relaying the whole story. In doing so, he only gives insight as to the absolute depth of his insanity as opposed to convincing one of his sanity. He states that it was a dispassionate crime and that he in fact cared for the victim who had never wronged him. "I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! He had he eye of a vulture "a pale blue eye, with a film over it."" he states in groping for an outlet upon which the blame could have been placed (3). After re-reading the story I wondered would could it have possibly been about the eye that made the narrator so furious. My conjecture was that to many, the eyes are mirrors to the soul and in the old man's eye, the narrator saw something reflected in himself that he found distasteful and set out to "rid- himself of it. If it was not obvious prior to this point, I believe it is impossible for any rational individual not to conclude that the narrator is, to put it lightly, mentally unbalanced. The narrator goes further to convince the readers of this by describing how he stalked up to the old man's room every night for a week and looked in on him, taking an entire hour just to get his head through the door. He doesn't actually commit the deed, however until the one night when the old man happens to be awake and the narrator is confronted by "the eye-. Just before he kills the old man, he is taunted by the supposed "beating of the old man's heart."" He attributes his ability to hear this to his newly acquired acuteness of senses. I hold to the belief that this was most likely the narrator's own heart pulsating in anticipation of committing the murder.
