Unreliable narration in "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe is an example of a horror story which primarily evolves through the use of psychological drama. The central protagonist commits a murder and is compelled to confess by his hallucination that the dead man's heart is still beating beneath the floorboards where he interred him, even though the narrator is really likely only hearing his own heart throbbing away. The story demonstrates how the human mind can create its own prison and how subjective human experience can be: what the protagonist perceives is not actually the truth despite his insistence he is sane: "How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story."
The unreliable character of the protagonist is established early on, which immediately makes the reader suspicious of his justification of the murder in the first place. "I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! 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." The narrator admits that the old man never did anything to harm him and even paradoxically claims that he loved the old man, when in fact he murdered him in cold blood. "It was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye," he insists.
The grisly manner in which he dispenses of the corpse the narrator also claims is evidence of his sanity, even though to the reader it likely seems barbaric. "If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs." The emphasis on dismemberment seems consistent with the narrator's tendency to focus on pieces of things and people, rather than upon the whole. First he focuses on the man's supposedly evil eye, next upon the beating of the man's heart which haunted him when he killed him. "But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me --the sound would be heard…
Tell-Tale Heart: A Descent into Madness Edgar Allan Poe may be considered one of the founders of American Gothic Literature. His obsession with the macabre and his ability to explore the psychological repercussions of perceived danger inspired him to write various short stories including "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe explores the events that lead the unnamed narrator to devise a plan to
Even the narrator himself appears to be tensioned concerning his account on what happened in the murder room. Whereas his initial narrative is rather slow, he picks up the pace as the storyline progresses, showing that he is discomforted with the overall state of affairs. Although the narrator describes the chain of events leading to the murder and the crime itself as if he would transmit a confession, the fact
Tell-Tale Heart The narrator of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" intentionally mystifies the reader by demanding respect for his narratorial authority while constantly calling his own judgment and sensory perceptions into question. The effect is to create a sense of suspicion surrounding the narrator which is confirmed not when he murders the old man, but when he reveals the madness which causes him to hear the old man's
Tell-Tale Heart Philosophy of Composition in the "Tell-Tale Heart" The central elements of this philosophy used by Edgar Allan Poe are length, method, and unity of effect (Xroads 2013). In all of his works, he advises writers to follow a set of criteria for producing literature. These are to plan the written product from the beginning to the end of the literature before they embark into writing anything. The end should always
This short story, as well as Poe's other works, reveals his upbringing and focuses on sick mothers and guilty fathers. Gothic literature, the form of the short story, became known in Britain in the 18th century. It delves into the dark side of human experience and there finds death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts and haunted places. It was Poe who brought the literary form to America. American Gothic literature present a
It first appears when he shines the lantern's light on the old man's eye. It is the lantern shining on the eye that spurs him to kill, in contrast to the previous nights where the eye had remained closed. The beating heart is the narrator's response to the desire to kill -- a reminder that the old man is a human being. The narrator misinterprets the beating heart and kills
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