Analysis of the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe

Born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. With his short stories and poems, Edgar Allan Poe captured the imagination and interest of readers around the world. His creative talents led to the beginning of different literary genres, earning him the nickname "Father of the Detective Story" among other distinctions.

Poe became a literary sensation in 1845 with the publication of the poem "The Raven." It is considered a great American literary work and one of the best of Poe's career.

In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia" and "William Wilson." Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with 1841's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for "The Gold Bug," a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure.

Continuing work in different forms, Poe examined his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including "The Philosophy of Composition," "The Poetic Principle" and "The Rationale of Verse." He also produced another thrilling tale, "The Cask of Amontillado," and poems such as "Ulalume" and "The Bells."

Poe’s writing possesses indubitable literary merit and serves as an encouraging example for aspiring writers. His writing demonstrates stylistic brilliance in the form of varying vocabulary, remarkable repetition, and instrumental imagery.

Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre he followed to appease the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. In many of Poe's works, setting is used to paint a dark and gloomy picture in our minds. His mysterious style of writing appeals to emotion and drama.

Poe has a brilliant way of taking gothic tales of mystery and terror and mixing them with variations of a romantic tale by shifting emphasis from surface suspense and plot pattern to his symbolic play in language and various meanings of words.  Poe uses a subtle style, tone, subconscious motivation of characters and serious themes to shift his readers towards a demented point of view.  This is the unique tactics Poe utilizes that makes him an impressionable writer and poet.

Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe takes us to the mind of a mad man as he struggles with the thoughts that caused him to do the unthinkable. He killed an old man, because of his eye, which scared the narrator. Through the whole story, the main character insists that he is not crazy.

There are three main themes of "The Tell Tale Heart": 

• Crime and punishment (every person, who committed a crime can’t escape punishment);
• Insanity (the reader can understand that the main character is crazy, based on his behavior, speech and thoughts. However, he believed and believes that he is and was perfectly sane. He thinks that it is normally to kill someone, because something makes you feel uncomfortable and irritates you); 
• Time (The narrator had been preparing for a murder for seven long nights. On the eighth night the old man heard that someone was in his room: “For a whole HOUR I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening;--just as I have done, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, hearkening to the death WATCHES in the wall.” Our life is measured in hours.

We can define two types of the setting of this story: physical and mental.

The physical settings are:

• the place, where now the narrator is (a prison or maybe an insane asylum); 
• the house, the bedroom, where was committed a murder. There are only few details about this house in the story, which are directly given. We know that the old man kept his shutters tightly locked. And we can only imagine a bedroom, where the narrator killed the old man. This story taps our fears of the dark, and what the dark might hold. Reading this story, you look involuntarily around… Maybe someone also spies on you. 

The most important setting of this story is mental. It clearly explains the personality of the narrator. We can or try to understand the actions of the narrator, we know his feelings. It gives us more clear idea of the main character, of his essence.

The action in the narrator's story takes place over eight days.

This story is written in the first person narrative. This technique is used to get inside the main character's head and view his thoughts and are often exciting. It helps us to understand the main character better.

The author is the main character of the story. He is the protagonist and the antagonist at the same time. He is nervous, paranoid and mentally ill. He doesn't know the difference between the "real" and the "unreal". He doesn't share his name, because he wants only to tell us what he had done. Or maybe he remembers that night when he committed a murder and tries to convince himself of being in his right mind.

But the reader can understand that he is crazy, based on his behavior, speech and thoughts. We can’t trust him, because he tries to show things in the most favourable light. We must draw conclusions ourselves.

He is a narrator and one of the characters at the same time. So we can say, that he is a dynamic character. There are given indirect (for example, how he watched the old man eight nights) and speech characteristics ("NERVOUS--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am!") of this character.

The next character is the old man. We can look at him through the eyes of the narrator. But, as it was mentioned, we can’t trust the main character. The old man had a blue eye, which irritated and scared the narrator: “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold…”. We can suppose that he was reach enough (the narrator showed the old man's "treasures" to the police), and he was afraid of robbers (“…for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers…”). But we can say, that he trusted the narrator, because he didn’t lock his bedroom’s door. The old man was incapable of defending himself: “His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself: "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney--it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions; but he had found all in vain.” He was in need of protection.  

The policemen and the neighbor are the secondary characters.

The three policemen don't really have any characteristics. But they play a major role in driving the plot of the narrator's story. The three policemen are fairly unambiguous, flat characters who do exactly what they are supposed to do.

The neighbor plays a small but important role in the narrator's story. Through the neighbor it is expressed narrator’s fear that someone can hear the perpetration of a crime.

The plot of the story (extract, passage) runs as follows:

Exposition of the story is when a nameless person (the narrator ) explains that he is and was extremely nervous, but is not and was not insane. Rather, the narrator has a "disease" which makes all his senses, especially his hearing, very sensitive. To prove that he is of sound mind, he tells us the story on how he killed the old man while pleading his sanity, all his preparations and how cautious he was: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded--with what caution--with what foresight--with what dissimulation I went to work!”.  But why he did? He loved the old man and had nothing against him. Except…his horrible eye, “…a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. The narrator hated the eye and decided to kill the old man to be free of it.

Every night, at almost 12am, the narrator came in the old man's bedroom and looked if the eye was open or not. The narrator did that for eight nights.It’s a story himself. Here the narrator tells us how he spied the old man.

The climax of the story comes at night of the murder. The main character is describing all his actions and feelings in extremely precise way. On the eighth night the he killed the old man, he smothered the old man and then “…dismembered the corpse… took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings… replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye--not even his--could have detected anything wrong”.

 The denoument is when three policemen came.The narrator was pretty calm. He gave them the guided tour of the house, and then invited to hang out with him in the man's bedroom. But, the narrator started to hear a terrible noise, which gets louder and louder. He thought that it was old man’s heartbeat and that everyone in that room heard it… But I think, it was heartbeat of the murderer. Somewhere deep in his mind he understood what he had done. To stop that noise, which drove him mad, the narrator told the cops to look under the floorboards and confessed to murder.

It is an author’s narration with some description and inner dialogues (monologue).

We can define many literary devices in this story. One of them are symbols.

·      The old man’s eye. It is a symbol of narrator’s paranoia and insanity: “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture… Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold”. We also see the old man’s essence through this eye.  “…a pale blue eye, with a film over it” - it indicates a lack of visual clarity and reliability of the man. That’s why he did’t trust people and was afraid of surrounding world.

·      The watch. The narrator several times mentioned a watch (“…there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a WATCH makes when enveloped in cotton” etc). A watch is a visual and auditory representation of time. Time symbolize the approach of death. The narrator, who literally controls the time of death for the old man, compares himself to a watch's minute hand.

·      The Heartbeat. It symbolizes the narrator’s guilt. He thought that he heard the heartbeat of the old man. But he heard his own heart, subconsciously he understood what he had done.

·      The bed and the bedroom. In such place as a bedroom we feel ourselves safe, because it’s our own place, where can’t be any threat for us. But Poe shows a bedroom as a place of murder and the bed – as a weapon. 

Poe uses a lot of repetitions: “…with what caution--with what foresight--with what dissimulation…“, “…how stealthily, stealthily…”, “slowly—very, very slowly”, “steadily, steadily”, “It grew louder--louder --louder!”, “They heard!--they suspected--they knew!”. It helps to intensify the situation, to make the atmosphere of the story more intensive and frightful. We are waiting what will be the next. Such repetitions help the reader understand the narrator's nervous state and his feelings.

We can see some examples of hyperbole, which help us to understand, that we are reading thoughts of a true madman: “I heard all  things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell” , “It took me an hour to place my whole head…”, “For a whole hour I did not move a muscle…”

Such metaphor as “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it” shows us, that the narrator was afraid the eye.  It is said, the vulture is an evil bird and associated with evil in literature. So, the narrator thought that it was the eye of Evil. “A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine”. This metaphor shows how cautious the narrator was in opening the door.

The personification of Death helps to develop mood: “because Death, in approaching him. had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim”.

There are some similes in this story: “His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness …”, “a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider “, “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”, “still dark as midnight”. They emphasize the quality and the state of some things.

alliteration: "Hearken...how healthily, how..."

There is an example of amplification: “I talked more quickly –more vehemently; but the NOISE STEADILY INCREASED. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the NOISE STEADILY INCREASED.” The narrator try to convince us that he is not mad. He emphasizes the fact.

Another rhetorical device that can be found within the story is epithet “dreadfully nervous”. It names the important characteristic of the character.

Parenthesis is also found within this short story: “I undid the lantern-oh, so cautiously –cautiously (for the hinges creaked) –I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye.” Here Poe uses the parenthesis to explain why the speaker undid the lantern so cautiously. “His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers), and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily” – Poe explains, why was so dark in the bedroom and gives some additional information about the old man.

We also can find some rhetorical questions: “Would a madman have been so wise as this?”, “Why would you say that I am mad”, “For what had I to fear?”. The answers are obvious. The narrator insists that he is sane, and doesn’t even suppose that he can be crazy.

Irony: The speaker keeps saying that he is not crazy but through his actions and speech we can make a conclusionthat he is. 

As we see, this story is really reach on stylistic devices. 

During the reading,  it is given the impression that you hear that heartbeat, the “low, dull, quick sound--much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”, that the old man’s eye, “a pale blue eye, with a film over it”, are piercing into you. In this story Poe takes us to the mind of a mad man as he struggles with the thoughts that caused him to do the unthinkable.

Poe's economic style of writing is a key instrument in making this story amazing. In this story, he uses his style to truly bring out what he intended for the story - a study of paranoia. He uses a lot of stylistic devices to reach the story, to make it more colorful and interesting.

The moral of this story is very clear. The feeling of guilt is very hard or even impossible to overcome, even a madman can’t cope with it.