The story begins with the narrator admitting that he is a "very dreadfully nervous" type. And as noted in the introduction to this section, this story shows the narrator's attempt to rationalize his irrational behavior. In a sense, the narrator is worse than a beast only a human being could so completely terrorize his victim before finally killing it, as, for example, the narrator deliberately terrorizes the old man before killing him. The story gains its intensity by the manner in which it portrays how the narrator stalks his victim - as though he were a beast of prey yet, at the same time, elevated by human intelligence to a higher level of human endeavor, Poe's "murderer" is created into a type of grotesque anomaly. Even though this is one of Poe's shortest stories, it is nevertheless a profound and, at times, ambiguous investigation of a man's paranoia.
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