Madness of the Heart
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a physiological thriller of madness and
murder. The story begins with the narrator describing his disease, and how it has heightened his awareness of the world around him, and how it leads him to the idea to murder his roommate. While professing love for the man with whom he shares his home, he stalks the man at night, slowly thrusting his head and lantern into the room to shine the light upon the man’s disfigured eye, which the narrator thinks is evil and vulture-like. On the eighth night, the old man hears the narrator when he tries again to shine the lantern into the room. He finally shines the light on the man’s disfigured eye, which is when he makes his move and kills the old man. He then takes his time and methodically disposes of the body under the floorboards of the room in which the murder occurred. The sounds of the scuffle bring the police, where whom he welcomes them in to investigate for any signs of a struggle. Secure in his clean-up of the crime, he even invites the police to rest in the very room in which the crime took place, even above the floorboards where he buried the body. Just as he is sure he has gotten away with the crime, he hears the heartbeat of the old man beneath the floorboards. The narrator becomes unsettled, believing that the police are setting him up for a trap, and at last, he confesses all to the police, even showing them where the body is buried.
The beating heart of the story represents the narrator's own insanity, only existing within his imagination, and it is an example of schizophrenia. Poe understood the depths of the human mind better than any writer of his time. Schizophrenia is a mental illness where sufferers hear noises, see things, and are paranoid of the greater world, believing that many people wish to do them harm, or trick them into revealing imagined information. The narrator shows the first signs of this illness early in the story. The narrator states, “I heard all things in the heaven and on the earth. I heard many things in hell” (39). The narrator is so obsessed; he spends every night for over a week stalking his roommate by entering his room and shining a lantern onto the old man’s face to see if his deformed eye is open. When the police arrive, he welcomes them into the home and is a gracious host until he believes that he hears the deceased man’s heart beating. Clearly, the heartbeat is a manifestation of the narrator’s own illness because the detectives hear nothing. He says, “I gasped for breath-and yet the officers heard it not” (41). Paranoia appears in the story when he believes that the detectives are trying to trick him into revealing his crime. The narrator says, “They heard!-they suspected!-they knew!-they were making a mockery of my horror” (42).
Some might believe that the beating heart is only a symbolism of the narrator’s guilt, but there is clear evidence that Poe was describing so much more than guilt. The fact that Poe understood the depths in which the human mind could go to before modern psychology was even born is proof that he was describing more than just guilt.
Believing that he had advanced hearing, having no real disagreement with his roommate other than a dislike of a disfigurement that the old man could do nothing about, and paranoia are all sure signs that the writer understood human psychology and wrote about a man whose world view was altered by mental illness.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Tell Tale Heart.” Literature for Life. Eds. Kennedy, X.J. et al. Boston: Perarson, 2012. 38-42. Print.
Shirley Crow
2013
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