“The Tell-Tale Heart” 881the protagonist seems to enjoy the malicious mind
games that he inflicts upon the old man: “I knew
that he had been lying awake ever since the first
slight noise when he had turned in the bed. His
fears had been ever since growing upon him. . . . He
had been saying to himself, ‘It is nothing but the
wind in the chimney, it is only a mouse crossing the
floor.’ ” However, the cruel narrator knows that the
old man’s “comforting” rationalizations are “in vain”
because death is approaching.
The protagonist’s cold-blooded and pitiless atti-
tude actually facilitates the murder that he commits.
By allowing his hatred for the old man’s “blue eye”
to overcome him, the vindictive narrator is able to
disassociate, or detach, himself from the violent act
of killing and dismembering the old man. Once
finished, the malicious narrator “smiled gaily . . .
[now that] his eye would trouble me no more.” As
he gains more confidence for having gotten away
with murder, the narrator begins to imagine that
the brutal slaying of the old man simply had to
be done. The banality of his evil deed reaches its
climax when the police officers arrive. He spitefully
admits, “I smiled, for what had I to fear?” However,
he ultimately becomes a victim of his own cruelty.
By the end of the story, his growing guilt over the
murder subsumes the perverted pleasure he derived
from destroying the blue eye, culminating in his
self-incrimination and the discovery of the old man’s
violent demise.
The thematic thread of cruelty in “The Tell-Tale
Heart” is heightened by Poe’s use of gothic elements.
Gothic literature traditionally combines horror with
romance, both of which are present in this story. The
narrator is clearly obsessed with the old man and
often vacillates between an extreme hatred of the old
man’s evil eye and a pathetic adoration that is fueled
by undercurrents of self-identification and covert
sympathy. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is also laden with
other trademark devices often featured in gothic fic-
tion, including terror (psychological and physical),
mystery, madness, darkness, death, decay, and decep-
tion. Moreover, the protagonist is an archetypal
gothic character: a villainous maniac who murders in
cold blood and, at times, represents the devil himself.
What is interesting to note, however, is that his guilt,
mental illness, and cruel tendencies all converge to
create a gothic tyrant who is in denial and beyond
self-control. Never, at any point in the story, does the
protagonist confess to any of his dangerous qualities.
Rather, he is constantly projecting his own proclivi-
ties onto others: The old man’s blue eye is “evil”; the
police officers are “villains”; and he lives in a “cruel”
world that ignores the plight of those who suffer
from a fear of the night. In fact, he is obsessed with
convincing the reader of his sanity, stating, multiple
times, that his “over-acuteness” is not a by-product
of his madness but, rather, of his superior mental
acumen. As the narrator admits, while his actions
may be criminal, they are not “mad” because they
are calm and calculated. Nevertheless, despite his
merciless machinations, he is ultimately trapped in
his own cruel game, becoming the tragic victim of
the insanity that he so forcefully denied.
Tanfer Emin TuncGuILt in “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Despite his “normal” self-portrayal, it is clear from
the tone and mood of “The Tell-Tale Heart” that the
narrator is mentally unstable and vacillates between
love and hate. During the day, he exhibits a fond
affection for the elderly man, but at night, he stalks
him and plots his murder. Ironically, the murderer
and his victim are kindred spirits: They both suffer
from abandonment and have been marginalized by
society for their peculiarities. They inhabit the same
boarding house, and both suffer from insomnia and
a terrifying loneliness, especially at night. However,
the narrator’s obsession with the old man’s veiled,
blue “vulture” eye allows him to ignore their human
similarities and inhumanely reduce his antagonist
to body parts. His fixation only intensifies the week
before the murder when he befriends the old man as
part of his murderous plot.
During that week, the paranoid narrator becomes
increasingly preoccupied with destroying the blue
eye and its icy knowing gaze, which he believes is
recording his every move. He resolves that murder-
ing the antagonist is the only solution. Killing the
old man would destroy his film-covered, opaque
eye, which, to the narrator, represents the torment
of aging alone, of seeing the evils of the world, of
blindly witnessing tragedy without having the cour-
age to speak out. The old man observed the horrors