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

The narrator insists that his "caution [and] foresight [and] dissimulation" prove his sanity.  In other words, he believes that the patience with which he moves forward with his plan to kill the old man, the care he takes in going at the same time each night and moving so slowly as he places his head into the old man's room show that he is not mad.  Moreover, he has the foresight to get a tub in which to dismember the old man, making it easier to cut him apart without making a terrible mess (dismemberment also makes the old man easier to bury).  Finally, he believes that his ability to deceive the old man and be so kind to him during the week he plots the man's murder is further evidence of his sanity.


The narrator's inability, however, to recognize the sound he hears as his own heart and not the old man's, especially after he has murdered and dismembered the old man, seems to confirm his madness.  Further, his obsession with the old man's "vulture eye," provides more evidence of his insanity.  A sane person would not develop such a severe antipathy to an eye, symbolic or not, that he would feel the need to murder the eye's owner.

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