“The Tell-Tale Heart”

In Edgar Allen Poe’s transformative short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the reader is privileged with a glimpse into the future. The way Poe’s narrative empowers and furthers his sole character’s development is characteristic of an artist operating well before his time. Through these developments, it becomes clear that Poe’s narrator acts as a kind of proxy for Poe himself, simultaneously decrying his horrible crime while also endeavoring to convince the reader of his sanity. As such, Poe’s classic tale illustrates the oscillating nature between sanity and insanity in such a way as imagines how the ordinary actor might endure this crisis of conscience and identity.

From the outset, we imagine that the sound so like that of a beating heart is, in fact, a kind of hallucinatory phenomenon. And yet, the sound is no less real to the reader, who perceives it just as soundly as does the narrator. This trope begins to suggest the blurred line that often exists between perception and reality and this blurred line operates at the core of the tale, as it manifests as the border between the real and the imagined, which is where the narrator appears to live. Indeed, the narrator introduces himself to the reader and no sooner has he done this does he feel compelled to defend his actions to the reader, despite that he has not yet told his tale. This kind of narrative uncertainty brings the reader directly into the heart of the narrator, compensating for the lack of direction provided by him.

In seeking to identify a method inherent in his madness, our narrator does what the ordinary man does on a daily basis—he seeks not only to explain and justify his conduct but to vindicate his moral character entirely in claiming that the sheer precision of the manner in which he committed a brutal murder itself suggests that he is something other than insane. It is as though elegance in murder suggests a killing of less lowly character. In this regard, we glimpse in Poe’s tale a foreshadowing of the kind of murderous traits so readily identified in serial killer type characters such as Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs or the eponymous character of ShowTime’s hit series “Dexter.” Poe’s character has altered his perception of reality in order to morally substantiate not his heart or soul, but his mind.

And yet, the narrator has driven himself and his mind past the point of sanity in committing murder in such bizarrely precise fashion and in such a way as ensures that his victim will feel terror to the fullest extent possible. The narrator wishes to murder the old man, but only when he is sure that his eyes are open. In other words, the narrator appears to desire that his victim suffer or, indeed, it appears that the narrator is taking his victim’s life as much for the pleasure of witnessing his terror as anything else. Indeed, the narrator chooses to first dismember the old man’s body and then hide the dismembered parts under the floorboards, as opposed to burying them somewhere off-site. It is as though the narrator wishes to ensure that the beating heart of his victim can be heard by him for as long as he remains in his house. As such, the narrator ensures that not merely a vestige, but the hole of his victim remains just beneath his feet, close enough to playfully haunt him, but far enough away to shield him from guilty consciousness.

When police officers arrive to question the narrator, it is precisely because of his sociopathic nature that they do not suspect a thing; the narrator’s mannerisms are easygoing and his nature wholly accommodating. This encounter seems to amount to a foreshadowing of the easygoing way Norman Bates received inquires into his many murderous transgressions. Similarly, the narrator seems to take pleasure in his ability to coolly avoid the implication of guilt or sin. But when there remain no third parties to whom he can display his easygoing nature or with whom he can share the ease with which he has murdered, the narrator begins to become uncomfortable and it becomes unclear to the reader whether the sound of the old man’s heart heard by him is a function of an over-active imagination or his desire to further descent into the less than sane recesses of his mind. In considering this reality, we are forced to also consider how far our imagination is taken as we read Poe’s tale and whether we are truly toeing the line between imagination and reality.

Ultimately, our narrator convinces himself of his guilt, at least to some extent. After finding it unbearable to continue listening to what he perceives as his victim’s beating heart from beneath the floorboards on which he and the police officers are sitting, our narrator suddenly confesses his crime. It is as though he must confess his crime in order to have others share in his pride for having committed it, though he originally believed that the sheer extent of his own pride would be sufficient to offset any desire for third-party attention. Similarly, the most notorious serial killers of the 20th Century felt compelled to confess their crimes, often in gruesome detail, as soon as they became conscious of the fact that they would never see the light of day again. Accordingly, Poe’s tale anticipates the extent of this sociopathy and how it might evolve within a given person of even the most easygoing demeanor. But Poe’s tale extends beyond this exploration of sociopathic tendencies and explores the way these tendencies betray themselves and, in so doing, the one who acts upon them.

Ultimately, Poe’s tale speaks to the overwhelming inescapability of criminal intent. In endeavoring to firmly establish his innocence, our narrator succeeds only in fully exposing his own literal guilt, while also baring his guilty intellectual conscience. The narrator feels some shame in tacitly acknowledging his insanity, as though a capacity for murder without shame would be indicative of genuine sanity. The bizarre moral hierarchy set up by the narrator for himself is characteristic of the narrative confusion into which Poe thrusts the reader in medias res. The reader is thus somehow thrust into the consciousness of the narrator, forced to consider whether his or her narrator is reliable or merely leading them up a primrose path, while also forcing him or her to explore the depths of his or her own sanity. The reader thus enjoys a kind of virtual reality-esque experience in making his or her way through the tale’s twists and turns. In so doing, the reader imagines him or herself as being in full control, just as he or she considers that this unreliable narrator also believes himself to be the master of his own destiny.

In this sense, the acute awareness or hypersensitivity that the narrator claims to be afflicted by emerges as a kind of point of commonality to be identified for the reader. It is as though this acute sensitivity to physical phenomenon can be palpably sensed and the reader is forced to consider whether he or she has ever experienced something of the sort experienced by the narrator. In so doing, the reader contemplates just how far he or she would be willing to go to prove his or her own sanity beyond all doubt. It is within the narrative context of oscillating between the imagined and the real that the reader experiences “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In so experiencing, the tale’s elegance emerges—the story is able to embed the narrator within a complex psychological encounter that forces him or her to come to terms with the most basic of primordial urges, as projected today through some of the more popular sociopathic characters of our time. In this sense, Edgar Allen Poe’s tale transcends the time in which he wrote it, delving deeper into the blurred line between imagination and reality than had ever been done before.

Work Cited

Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Pioneer. Boston: James Russell Lowell, 1843.