Edgar Allan Poe

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

This story was considered quite shocking in Poe's time and it is still revered today as a masterpiece of horror. The narrator begins by assuring us that he is not mad and then, through the story he relates, he convinces us beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is as mad as a hatter. It would be inappropriate to say that this was the first time a totally immoral murderer told the tale of his murders from his viewpoint, however it is so rarely done that it is almost like seeing the world from the eyes of an alien. Robert Bloch would use this same technique to some degree with his character, Norman Bates, in Psycho and Peter Lorre would often incorporate it into his performances, particularly in The Stranger on the Third Floor.

The narrator tells us that he loved a certain old man very dearly. But the old man had one fault that the narrator simply could not abide. The old fellow had a pale blue eye like a vulture. What is it that our narrator saw in that eye? Could it have been his own reflection? Did he possibly fear that the old man saw some evil part of him that he wished to keep hidden? For seven nights the narrator creeped into the old man's room and shone a light on the offending eye. The eighth night he decided to do the old man in. He became acutely aware of the increasingly loud beating of a heart. He tells us it was the old man's heart that he heard beating louder and louder, but one suspects the heart he heard was his own. He then smoothered the old man with his mattress and dismembered the body.

After removing all traces of blood, some of which he had caught in a pan, be hid the old man's body beneath the floor boards of the room. Suddenly the police arrived. Neighbors had reported screams. At first our narrator was quite calm and collected but as he continued his conversation with the police he began to hear a heart beating; louder, and louder, and louder. Eventually, he could take no longer endure it and he confessed his crime. This story gives us vivid insights into self-deception and rationalization but I think the thing that makes it stick in our minds is that the villain here is desperately trying to get back to reality but he just can't make it. This a tale of the hopelessly lost and there's a certain melancholy in the fact that a human being can become so inhumane that he is no longer a participating member in our species.

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