Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...

The lines are spoken by the unnamed first-person narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Addressing an implied listener (often read as police, a judge, or the reader), the narrator insists he is not insane and offers his meticulous planning as proof of sanity. The story centers on his obsession with an old man’s “vulture eye,” his calculated murder of the old man, and his attempt to conceal the body. Poe frames the confession as a performance of rationality that steadily collapses under the pressure of guilt and auditory hallucination, culminating in the narrator’s breakdown.

The passage dramatizes Poe’s hallmark irony: the narrator equates careful method with mental health, yet the very need to prove sanity signals instability. “Madmen know nothing” is a self-serving definition that lets him claim reason while describing compulsive fixation and violence. The insistence “you should have seen me” turns the confession into a persuasive spectacle, emphasizing how rhetoric can mask moral and psychological disorder. The quote also highlights a central theme of the story—hyper-rational control giving way to uncontrollable inner disturbance—suggesting that madness may appear as heightened lucidity rather than incoherence.