Tell Tale Heart

When one first reads the "Tell Tale Heart", they are instantly slammed with the thought that the narrator is mentally ill, and thus, his analysis of the incidents he took to kill the old man, whom we assume to be innocent and have been mutilated for no reason. Interestingly enough, the website that will be listed below brings a different theory to this.
Edgar Allen Poe is known to have written Southern Gothic-Works dealing with the anxiety and struggles of Slavery in the Southern part of the United States. Unlike his work "The Black Cat", this takes a little more thinking. The website presents the potential thought that the narrator is a slave, and invading the small privacy that the "master", the old man has, gives him joy as slaves have very little privacy.
On the other hand, if the man is mentally ill, a physical problem, known as Tinnitus, only exemplifies the problems. Tinnitus is an ear condition that can cause auditory hallucinations, intense sensitivity to sound, and potentially amplified hearing. This means that the hearing of the heart in the floor isn't as psychotic as one may want to contribute to this detail in the story.
We now have a little more information that can change the reader's view on the narrator. It's possible that he does still have a mental disorder, but a case of Tinnitus is making it seem worse than it may really be. If he's a slave living in a very racist and segregated Southern United States, we sort of make a bond with him, his anger understandable with what he and his family has been put through by this old man.
Before jumping into the old man and his "innocent falling", we must consider the possibility of his being a slave owner. If the narrator is indeed a slave, then the slave owner must trust him because he's able to get into the house and even see into his private sleeping quarters at night. And from the lines in the story stating that the old man was afraid of robbers, this means that the narrator had his trust. Possibly a servant in the house? Or someone he didn't mind remaining in the acutal house (The story never states the the narrator is a male). Therefore, the man had to trust the narrator for him to get this close.
The information pulled from the story gives the narrator an even more negative light as the man could have had a corneal ulcer, which gave him the blue eye. He could have been senile as he was not aware of what was going on, and it wasn't even until the 8th night that he was able to hear the narrator creeping, and then he didn't have a single suspeicion that anything was out of the ordinary.
As to whether the antagonist was the old man or the narrator lies in the mind of the reader and their choice to interpret it a certain way. With the small bit of information given above, both people have negative light, though the narrator seems to have more deemed upon him. Now the choice is yours, who was the antagonist: The Old man, who could have pushed the narrator to do this, or the Narrator who can easily be seen as mentally ill (and with great reason)?


Source of Information: http://www.shmoop.com/tell-tale-heart/old-man.html