"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe is narrated in the first person. The nameless narrator is speaking to an unknown audience addressed only as "you," although as we read the story we can deduce that the nameless "you" may well be a police officer or a jury. He starts his speech by proclaiming that he is not insane:
TRUE! —nervous —very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses —not destroyed —not dulled them.
The rest of the story is a narrative in which the speaker tries to supply us with evidence that he is not insane. The more we learn of his thoughts and actions, however, the more we, as readers, draw precisely the opposite conclusion.
The narrator's decision to murder a man who has never harmed him is the first act that belies his claim of sanity. The second set of actions is his very careful stalking of an old man who really could put up no resistance. The narrator's baroque manner of devising a lamp that could illuminate only the eye of the old man but not the rest of him, under the delusion that the eye itself was evil, is additional evidence of his insanity.
The narrator claims that his dismembering the old man and hiding the body under the floorboards is evidence of sanity, but actually it is the reverse, as it connects him to the murder in the way that dumping the body in a river or burying it some distance away would not. Thus the narrator's actions disprove his words claiming that he is sane.
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