Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

I was surprised at the curiosity I felt towards the narrator as I started reading Mr. Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart. I felt drawn into the passion of the madness while being horrified at the coldness of the individual planning this murder. Mr. Poe's story allowed me to comprehend the psychosis of the narrator. I think this story is about the process of a relationship turning to hate (Womack, 2007). I found the progression of degeneration of the narrator's mind fascinating (Thomson, 2000).

Often mad people and paranoiacs fix on objects and given them more significance that a sane person would. Sanity or insanity is incidental; obsessions can be dangerous things. The narrator's fixation on the old man's eye and then the beating heart shows that the narrator has developed a pointed fixation on specific body parts which dehumanizes the old man into less than a person to be respected. In Mr. Poe's story, the eye is described "all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones" and "resembled that of a vulture" (Poe, 1843). The narrator's belief that the old man has an evil eye makes anything the narrator will do in the future possible. The narrator's focus on the beating heart as a personal scale of winning or loosing the battle against the evil eye was one of the few times the narrator's seemed back in control of their subjective reality (Womack, 2007).

The narrator's justification of "a case of nerves" as a sign of clarity and saneness was fascinating. Often the claim of saneness is a justification by a paranoiac to others for any action they would or have undertaken. To have the narrator casually link unrelated actions as a normal cause and effect is again another practice of a paranoid mind. The narrator makes the continued claim that he or she is sane hoping for a self fulfilling validation. The narrator's problems with perception were a counterpoint to the physical action in this story. The lack of ability to determine reality as seen in the problems with perception of sounds along with the abnormal perception of time intervals is just another characteristic of the deranged mind of the narrator (Baym, 2003) (Poe, 1843) (Thomson, 2000) (Womack, 2007).

Mr. Poe wrote this short story from his imagination and made it an exercise in anxiety for almost all involved; the narrator, the old man and any reader. I think it is a great Gothic horror tale both short and malevolent. Mr. Poe created a story of a paranoid mind capable of obsessive murder, while casually explaining the necessity of it all (Baym, 2003) (Poe, 1843) (Thomson, 2000) (Womack, 2007).

Works Cited:

Baym, N. (Ed.). (2003). The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York, New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Poe, E. (1843). The Tell Tail Heart. Retrieved June 7, 2007, from The Literature Network Web site: http://www.online-literature.com/poe/44/

Thomson, G. (2000).The Tell-Tale Heart - Short Story Criticism. Retrieved June 5, 2007, from eNotes.com web site: http://lit.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/ tell-tale-heart-edgar-allan-poe.htm

Womack, M. (2007). Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". Retrieved June 6, 2007, from The Poe Decoder Web site: http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/ttheart/