The Tell-Tale Heart Analysis

   Edgar Allen Poe's story, "The Tell-Tale Heart", is about a person who goes insane and commits murder. When the police come, the person thinks he hears the sound of the dead man's heart beating, goes crazy, and exposes the remains to the cops.
   I'm going to assume that the person is a man, since it is written in the first person and Poe is a guy. The man appears to be a servant of the other older man. A child or family member would not go to greet his father that early in the morning (unless it was a very obedient child). The servant lives in the house with him and is creeped out by the old guy's "evil eye". The evil eye could have scared the man so much that he wanted to commit murder. Think about it. The servant had to stay in that house for a long, long time (since he knew the old man's name and they seemed to know each other well), always being terribly scared of the eye. In the story, the man even said he had trouble sleeping because he was haunted by his thoughts. The man could have been so scared of the eye that he would kill the old man to get rid of it. Its possible because of what the evil eye was thought of back then (when people still believed in witches and magic) and the history behind it. So having the fear of the eye haunt him day in and day out drove him to insanity, and probably helped developed his anxiety.
   I also think that he did not really hear the old man's heartbeat. It was probably a clock, which you can always here when its quiet, or the man's own heartbeat. He was felt so guilty and terrible about what he had did (since he actually liked the old man), he couldn't tell the difference. This change of heart is brought on by the absence of the eye. The eye is what drove him insane, without it around he is normal; and a normal person would feel extremely guilty about killing someone, especially someone he liked.
  The main character is just a normal guy driven crazy by an irrational (during that time period it might have been rational) fear of the evil eye and having to be constantly around it. Once the eye was gone, he turned sane again and his guilt caused him to reveal where the dead man was. However after such a traumatic event, the guy probably turned insane later, which is why he keeps in claiming that he was not insane.