First-person unreliable. The narrator is obviously deranged, readers learn during his telling of his tale, even though he declares at the outset "mad am I not." He tells readers that excessive drinking helped to bring on his erratic, violent behavior. (It may be that the drinking worsened an existing mental condition.) The narrator tells his story as he sees it from his demented point of view. As in many of his other short stories, Poe does not name the narrator. A possible explanation for this is that the unnamed narrator becomes every human being, thereby enhancing the universality of the short story. In other words, the narrator represents anyone who has ever acted perversely or impulsively–and then had to pay for his deed.