882 Poe, Edgar Allan
of life with his eyes metaphorically shut and now
in old age, as death approaches, cannot even keep
them closed long enough to sleep through the night.
He, like the narrator, is consumed by nightmares—
by the guilt of undisclosed, past events—and the
alienation that has come to define his life.
The narrator first becomes conscious of the
beating heart (which was probably his own racing
heart) as he approaches the old man to commit the
murder. He is distracted by the sound, which grows
louder and louder as the moment of horror draws
near, increasing his “fury as the beating of a drum
stimulates the soldier into courage.” Trying to keep
his composure and guilt in check, he focuses on the
blue eye, the object of his hatred, and not on the
human being who is the unfortunate vehicle of his
obsession. He is able to detach the person from the
eye, suffocating him with his own bed linens. The
narrator dismembers the body, which is appropriate
given the fact that he perceives his victim not as a
human being but as mere body parts, and then arro-
gantly conceals the limbs, torso, and head under the
old man’s bedroom floorboards.
Even though the old man is “stone dead” and his
eye will trouble the narrator no longer, the beating
of his heart (the narrator’s guilt) only intensifies. It
reaches a fevered pitch when police officers come to
investigate screams that had been reported by neigh-
bors. The protagonist calmly explains to the officers
that he had shrieked because of a dream and that
the old man was visiting relatives in the countryside.
He confidently invites them in and even shows
them the old man’s room, placing his chair over the
area where the corpse is buried. This fatal flaw of
delusional arrogance eventually begins to chip away
at the narrator’s conscience: He grows pale, his head
begins to throb, and his heart begins to pound, just
like the pulsating heart, which is “ringing” under the
floorboards.
Even though the officers do not suspect the nar-
rator and, as he notes, forget about the investigation,
starting to chat “of familiar things,” his increasing
guilt (represented by the increasing, unified intensity
of his heartbeat coupled with the imagined heart-
beat of the old man), compels him to act erratically.
He begins to speak and gesticulate violently, gasping
for breath as if suffocating (just like the old man had
suffocated): “I paced the floor to and fro with heavy
strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of
the men—. . . I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung
the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated
it upon the boards, but the noise [of the heart] arose
over all and continually increased.” The beating of
the heart (his guilty conscience) is intensifying, yet
the officers continue to chat and smile pleasantly. As
he writhes in both mental and physical anguish, the
narrator begins to believe that the officers’ compla-
cency is actually mockery. No longer able to tolerate
their “derision, hypocrisy and suspicion,” he incrimi-
nates himself: “Villains!” I shrieked, “Dissemble no
more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here,
here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!” The
unbearable guilt of the murder finally unites the two
men in an inescapable destiny that hinges on the
simultaneous beating of their “tell-tale hearts.”
Tanfer Emin TuncILLneSS in “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a master-
ful examination of both the mental psychoses and
physical debilities that often characterize a murderer.
A cursory reading of the story immediately reveals
that the protagonist is not only paranoid but also
suffers from delusions of grandeur that allow him
to rationalize the old man’s murder through ego-
tistical excuses. Moreover, he also complains of an
overarching nervous disorder which manifests itself
through trembling, paleness, and an “over-acuteness”
(or hypersensitivity) to environmental stimuli. As
the narrator discloses: “The disease had sharpened
my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above
all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things
in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things
in hell.”
The narrator’s mental and physical ailments are
antagonized by the internal conflict that he faces as
he plots the murder. He is clearly sympathetic to
the old man and his personal struggles (he even suf-
fers from the same bouts of loneliness and “mortal
terror,”) yet he insists that his victim must perish
because of his “Evil Eye” (which is probably “veiled”
due to glaucoma). Thus, the reader is presented with
the possibility that the protagonist might suffer not
just from paranoia but also from schizophrenia or