1.     The narrator insists from the very beginning of the story that he is not insane. What characteristics does he say prove his sanity? What characteristics suggest his madness instead?

          All throughout the story the narrator keeps boasting about his shrewdness and how careful he is, especially in his concealment of the old man’s body. He claims that no one that is insane could pull off what he was doing with as much precision and with as much caution, and he kept giving reasons as to why anyone in his position would have done the same thing. He says that his “madness” just seems that way to people whose senses aren't as acute as his, but this is all just the narrator’s perspective. When you read the story you can see that the narrator is very much unstable, such as his obsession with the old man’s eye. Was the eye really evil or did it awake something within the narrator, did he obsess about it so much that it finally made him snap? I believe the narrator’s madness was always there, it just took something to really irk him in order to bring it out. Maybe the eye would have been enough to weird anyone out but it would take a madman to take someone’s life because of how their eye looked. The narrator’s repetitions of his words made him seem proud of what he’d done, he wanted everyone to know just how expertly he’d done everything, and a sane person wouldn't be proud. He broke into the old man’s house after dark on a daily basis, skulking, obsessing over how he’d do him in, fixated on how to get that eye to stop looking at him. The biggest indications of his madness were his auditory hallucinations, he could hear the old man’s heart beating in his chest, he could feel it. Even after he’d killed the old man and buried him under the floor boards he could still hear his heartbeat, which had now become a ringing in his ears, a ringing that only he could hear. Maybe he was subconsciously overcome with guilt over what he had done, which was why it drove him to confess.