“Madmen know nothing,” says the unidentified main character in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.” This short story is a psychological thriller and murder confession told from the point of view of an unknown killer. An unknown character begins by stating that he is not crazy because if he were he could confess it calmly. He then proceeds to tell how for seven nights he haunted the old man he lived with, finally killing him on the eighth night. He is able to provide an extremely detailed description of events, too detailed for a normal person to remember. Although it deals with issues of psychotic behavior and guilt, the most important element in this story is Poe's use of irony. Poe uses irony to further convey the message that the narrator is undeniably crazy. He does this by having the narrator defend his sanity only to appear delusional and in the process damage his credibility even more. Before beginning his tale, the unnamed narrator claims to be nervous and hypersensitive but not crazy, and offers his calmness in the narrative as proof of his sanity. Although the narrator is aware that this rationalization seems to indicate his madness, he explains that he cannot be mad because he proceeded with “caution” and “forethought,” and a madman would not have been as intelligent as him. The irony of the narrator's tale in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that, although he proclaims himself to be too calm to be a madman, he is defeated by a noise that can be interpreted as the beating of his own heart. Due to the narrator's unreliability, it is impossible to know for sure whether the beating is a supernatural effect, the product of his imagination, or a real sound... middle of paper... short story. It is ironic that the very fear he seeks to demolish (the evil eye) is the very fear responsible for his downfall. The narrator expects that his troubles will go away and that the old man will never be discovered, will never have to see “the eye” again, and no one will ever deduce that he is the culprit. However, this is not the end of the story, as the ending is the opposite of what the narrator expects. In the end he confesses and admits having killed the old man even though when the officers first arrived he said he had nothing to fear. In his audacity he led the officers into the old man's room and placed his character "on the very spot under which the victim's corpse rested." It turns out that the narrator was not as smart and cunning as he thought and has a nervous breakdown which eventually drives him to admit "the act.”