In the story, "The Tell-Tale Heart", by Edgar Allen Poe, it deals with the human mind and the decisions people chose to make. In this specific piece we see how a mentally insane person goes about their decisions and what their thought process is when facing situations that require moral decision making.  According to Seharmes Web article “Moral/Philosophical Literary Criticism of The Tell Tale Heart” this story teaches the reader about life, specifically when you are faced with a problem with something or someone and you have to decide how to handle it. The article gives two options on how to deal with your problem, you can either face your fears or you can talk to someone about them. You must be ready for your consequences of your actions because eventually your conscious will catch up with you. Eventually your conscious is going to drive you crazy to the point where you will confess what you did. Jonathan Swift, writing nearly 100 years prior to the release of Tell Tale Heart, tackled this same issue in his short story, “A Modest Proposal.” When it comes to someone's morality you would hope they make the safest and most reasonable decision. However, do to ulterior motives both narrators make the wrong decision to show the reader what not to do. The message these stories wanted to portray is when someone or multiple people's lives are on the line the best thing to do is be honest and be reasonable. Today, there are many cases where morality is thrown out the window and pressure, money, and insanity make a decision instead of what is really the right thing to do. While at first glance these two texts might seem radically different, a closer comparison of a common theme will show that, both stories show challenges the human brain face when faced with a moral decision of right vs wrong.

In both texts, the narrator eventually feels sympathy for the people they take advantage of. In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator does not feel any remorse for the old man whom he takes care of because of his glass eye. Through the whole story he complains how to eye drives him insane and that he has nothing against the old man but he needs to kill him so the eye will stop bothering him. Once he finally does kill the old man, he feel remorse for what he did. He ignored his morals and his conscience and killed a man in cold blood. His sympathy shows that he made the wrong moral decision and that doing something on an impulse can lead to destructive results. This coincides with what the narrator in “A Modest Proposal.” goes through. The narrator is portrayed as a British parliament member who is oppressing the people of Ireland for their money. Obviously this is a horrible thing to do but because he is distracted by the profits of oppressing the Irish he is blinded to the right thing to do. We see how the narrator's brain works when he suggests ridiculous proposals on how to fix the poverty and birth rate in Ireland. By suggesting eating babies and cooking them in stew, we can see the narrator has lost his mind and is not capable of making the correct moral decisions.  

A person's conscious will eventually catch up to them if they are making immoral decisions. No matter how insane a person can be their will always be a part of the brain that is reasonable. That is why many people go insane because they cannot face reason and reality and they feel the need to do something that nobody else would. Often times it is just one thing that can trigger a person to do something completely irrational. In “The Tell Tale Heart” the main character could be a normal person who works as a caretaker, but he is for some reason triggered by the old man's eye. His insanity over the eye keeps him up at night, affects his daily life, and is the only thing he can think about. His insanity completely controls his moral decision making and drives him to killing the old man, which is when he finally has his conscious moment. After doing something so terrible and so insane people will eventually realize the consequences of their actions. When something is done as dead or so beyond repair is when insanity begins to die down and morality begins to take over again. This is also the case in “A Modest Proposal”. After the narrator suggests eating children to solve the Ireland’s poverty problem, the story begins to slow down in terms of insane ideas. After the most absurd idea comes out is when people begin to question what they have thought before and return their ideas to reasonable ones. Even though their is nothing reasonable about the ideas provided by Swift, the peak of the insanity was certainly when he recommended weighing, selling, and eating children as the most reasonable way to solve Ireland's problems. Of course this never actually happened, but this is a great metaphor for showing how once people reach their maximum insanity they begin to digress back to sanity. 

The moral decision of right vs. wrong is always dictated by a person's selfishness. In “The Tell Tale Heart”, the caretaker of the old man has nobody's else's good intentions in mind other than his own. He feels no compassion for the old man whatsoever, but because HE feels distracted inside by someone else, he feels the need to solve that problem the best he can for himself. Unfortunately in many cases of insanity that results in the death of someone. In “A Modest Proposal”, the British Parliament has one thing in mind and that is money. They don't care whether or not the Irish people survive, but as soon as poverty becomes an issue and their own money become in jeopardy, they begin to act. Not for the Irish people obviously, but for themselves. They could care less whether or not the Irish people live but if their money is not coming in, then they begin to act. They care so little about the Irish and so much about their money that they actually suggest eating children, which may be the most insane thing I have ever hear in my life. Some people may say money controls people, but it is clear now that insanity does.

In both the "The Tell-Tale Heart", by Edgar Allen Poe, and “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift we see the decisions people chose to make under an insane state of mind. While at first glance these two texts might seem radically different, a closer comparison of a common theme will show that, both stories show challenges the human brain face when faced with a moral decision of right vs wrong. In both texts, the narrator eventually feels sympathy for the people they take advantage of. In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator does not feel any remorse for the old man whom he takes care of because of his glass eye. In “A Modest Proposal”, the narrator calms down after suggesting eating children to solve a poverty crisis. This essay taught me that a person's conscious will eventually catch up to them if they are making immoral decisions and that  moral decision of right vs. wrong is always dictated by a person's selfishness.
