The Tell Tale Heart
“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
The Tell-Tale Heart
6/10
This short story is truly a short story. Indeed, it can be read in about ten minutes. Accordingly, this unsolicited book report (Halloween Spooktacular) will be scraping the barrel in order to be more than a few lines long.
The Tell-Tale Heart was published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843 and describes, in the words of an unnamed narrator, the murder of an ‘old man’, his dismemberment, the resulting guilt, and, finally, a confession to the police.
Throughout the limited duration of the story, the unnamed narrator endeavors to convince readers of their sanity while detailing their strange behaviors and peculiar murder. They, as the gender of the unnamed narrator is not revealed, constantly beseech the reader not to think that they are mad, but rather are ‘nervous’ which has led to an “over-acuteness of [their] senses”. What is the motive for the murder? “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire.” Yes, instead of any understandable reason, unnamed narrator commits the murder because of the old man’s eye. “He had the eye of a vulture— a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”
In preparation for commission of the murder, unnamed narrator silently and incredibly slowly, sneaks into the old man’s room every night for a week. “Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved [my head] slowly —very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep”. The speed with which they sneak into the room is quite humorous. It’s a beyond unnecessarily and painfully slow caution, wherein it takes them “an hour to place [their] whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed”.
For each of the initial seven nights they sneak into the old man’s room, they want to see the vulture eye before they commit the deed. However, the eye is closed on each occasion, and this causes them distress. On the eighth night, things are different. “[T]he old man sprang up in bed, crying out—’Who’s there?’”. The unnamed narrator then silently stands in the dark, not ‘moving a muscle’, for an hour, while they suspect the old man is “sitting up in the bed listening”, as they had watched and listened on previous nights. Eventually, they decide that they can safely open their lantern a little to learn if they can see the old man’s eye. “[A]t length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye. It was open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness—all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.” At this time, unnamed narrator describes hearing a “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” and attributes this to the old man’s heart.
While looking at the vulture eye in the light of the lantern, the sound of the beating of the old man’s heart is described as getting “quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant” and unnamed narrator worries that the neighbours will hear it and attribute it to the terror that the old man is experiencing. Then, “as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage”, they decide the old man’s time has come and “With a loud yell, [I] threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him”. They hear the muffled beat of the old man’s heart under the bed and are satisfied that the neighbours can no longer hear it. “At length it ceased. The old man was dead.” After an inspection of the corpse and confirmation that the heart had stopped pulsing, they feel relief, believing “His eye would trouble me no more”.
Next, they turn their attention to dismembering the body to conceal their crime. They hide body parts under the floor boards of the house and congratulate themselves for their effective work. They say there was “nothing to wash out—no stain of any kind—no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!” Sadly for the poor unnamed narrator, the old man’s shriek before he was murdered had caught the attention of an interfering neighbour and they alerted the police. At four o’ clock, after the body had been concealed, they came knocking on the door.
Initially, unnamed narrator is feeling confident. They claim that the shriek the neighbours heard was them having a bad dream. “The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search— search well.” As part of the police search, unnamed narrator “showed them [the old man’s] treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim”.
This confidence, however, begins to fade after a while and their conversation with the officers moves from cheery discourse about “familiar things” to them acting incredibly suspiciously. Unnamed narrator says that their “head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct:—It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness—until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.” The sound, described as “a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”, grows louder and unnamed narrator worries that they police can hear it too. They begin to act erratically “pac[ing] the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men—but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased”.
Things reach a fever pitch, where unnamed narrator believes that the police know of their crime and were “making a mockery of my horror”. They believe that “Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!” Eventually, they cry out “’Villains!’…’dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!’” Thus, the story concludes.
Alas, I have no burns, except maybe the old man’s eye being compared to that of a vulture and calling the police ‘villains’, but these are closer to light scaldings. There were no tearful moments or strikes against the patriarchy.
Critics of literature have had some interesting conversations regarding this text, and it is often regarded a classic work of Gothic fiction. There is speculation that the unnamed narrator could be female, that the ‘old man’ could be a psychiatrist, or that unnamed narrator and ‘old man’ are father and son. In the latter scenario, the ‘vulture eye’ could represent parental supervision or observation. Other suggestions are that the story is an allegory of the conflict between imagination and science, where the old man represents rationality and the unnamed narrator, imaginativeness. Typically, the narrator hearing the old man’s heart beating under the floorboards is understood to represent their guilt and is taken as evidence of the madness that they so strongly deny in the story.
Happy Halloweeen
The Gipper
“I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations”
