As a defense against accusations of madness, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” confesses the history of his growing obsession with and ultimate murder of the old man with whom he lives. The reason for the killing, he explains, was the man's disfigured eye, which unnerved him to the point of violence. Yet while attempting to vindicate himself, the narrator seems to suggest that he had actually chosen the eye after the fact to rationalize an inexplicable fear and hatred of the other:

In this passage from the tale's opening, the narrator admits that he cannot reconstruct the causes of his repulsion.