The Tell-Tale Heart [short story]

Edgar Allan Poe’s very short story from 1843 still packs a punch. Stories about the heart make love spring first to mind, even if those hearts are broken. With Poe, it's bloodier, both literally and metaphorically.

What makes a cold-blooded killer? Madness, badness, or both?

A narrator of unknown age, gender, and relationship to an old man, earnestly, urgently defends their own sanity, as they explain exactly how they planned and committed his murder:
“So you think that I am mad? A madman cannot plan….
So I am mad, you say? You should have seen how careful I was.”
Or could the narrator be death himself?!

In contrast to the detail of the deed, everything else is vague.

It’s addressed to “you”, which is very direct, almost making show more the reader complicit. But we don’t know if they’re talking to themself, a psychiatrist (not that the profession existed back then), priest, God, judge, jailer, or unimagined readers, more than 150 years later. Nor why they are confessing. But it’s not to the three (significant, surely) police officers.

The victim is a man the narrator says has never harmed them, and whose death would not profit them. No reason is suggested beyond the sort of fears many of us have in childhood. In fact, motive is explicitly denied:
“There was no reason for what I did.”


Image: An eye peeking through a door. (Source.)

“I could not see the old man’s face. Only that eye, that hard blue eye, and the blood in my body became like ice.”

Take blood

The perfect crime.
Murder is so easy!

But then guilt kicks in, ticks in.
A metaphor made flesh, in flesh.
Bloody brilliant.

Give blood

I reread this in 2018 as I waited to donate my 71st pint of blood, and again in 2022, shortly after my 78th. A mystical and mundane substance, essential for life. It’s an easy way to save lives, for those who are able. Eligibility criteria change, so if you'd like to be a donor, but thought you couldn't be, it's worth checking. For those in the UK click HERE.

Image: “Save a life. Give blood.”. (Source.)
Mind you, occasionally, NHS Blood Donation does odd things, like this tie-in with “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Madness”, here. As the Tweeter says, “Is the NHS paying for Cumberbatch and Olsen to plug blood donation (with a Doctor Strange plug part of the deal)? Or is Disney paying the NHS to promote the film to their blood donation page?”

See also

I read this in parallel with HP Lovecraft’s Pickman’s Model (see my review HERE), which also opens with an anonymous narrator declaring their sanity.

Short story club

I reread this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

Reading a few old ghost stories, and this was the best so far! Very short, straight to the point, very intense. No difficulty with how "old" the writing was, and wondering if the language just hasn't changed from when it was written, or if the story has been re-edited to be understood in the 21st century.
Despite that, a lot of things are not explained, and the ending was very abrupt. But I suppose it was more of a horror story, with a tense vibe (which I really felt!), than a mystery to be explained.

Will be looking out for more Edgar Allan Poe stories. This one had me captivated.

What a quick little stab of the macabre this tale is! It's a classic example of the unreliable narrator, who tries desperately to convince the reader of his sanity even as he stalks, kills, dismembers, and buries an old man for no other reason than that the man's eye "resembled that of a vulture." Of course the harder he tries to convince the reader of his sanity, the more insane you realize he is: "You should have seen how wisely I proceeded--with what caution--what what foresight--with what dissimulation I went to work!"

This tale is also interesting in its use of the Ancient Greek technique of beginning "in medias res"--or in the middle of things. There's no preamble, no setting of the scene. Here's how the story begins: show more "True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" You immediately get the sense that the narrator is reacting to something or someone, perhaps an unnamed interlocutor who's just told him he's mad. Or perhaps he's simply arguing or contending with himself? With a narrator like this, you never know, which is why I love unreliable narrators. There's no stability, no objectivity--everything is a shifting sand of the mind. show less

One of my absolute favorite Poe stories:

Written by a murderer with uncredited sanity. He tells the story of his gruesome murder of an old man with a distressing vulture eye which the murderer has a unhealthy hatred of. He hides the dismembered body beneath the floor supposedly hearing his heartbeat where it is hidden. Which only discredits his sanity further.
Beautifully written, I think this tale truly puts you in the mind of this murderer who thinks he's sane but really is far from, or maybe makes you question what sanity really is.

"Ustedes me toman por loco. Pero los locos no saben nada. En cambio... ¡Si hubieran podido verme! ¡Si hubieran podido ver con qué habilidad procedí! ¡Con qué cuidado... con qué previsión... con qué disimulo me puse a la obra! "
Estupenda historia, la culpa no siempre lleva a la locura...a menos que ya estés loco...aunque a mi también me frekearía ese ojo

We read this story in eighth grade English. After we read it the teacher decided that we would have a trial to see if the killer was insane or not. I picked the side of sanity.

I was originally supposed to play a bit role, the assistant lawyer, I think. It quickly became apparent I was a better arguer than the guy who was supposed to be lawyer, so I took the role. And you bet I played into it. While the lawyer on the other side stayed seated, I stood up and loomed over the table-as-jury-box, getting completely into the role. There were laughs in the audience. I didn't care. I was going to win this trial. The question that cinched the outcome?

"Were you aware of what you were doing?"

"Yes," said the killer. The case was closed from there, show more my side won. I think I got ten extra credit points or something.

Jokes on them though.

He's totally insane. show less

reread this yarn from my youth and it still causes my heart to skip a beat - used to lie down asleep in those quainter, quieter days and feign frighten myself with the sound of my own heartbeat reverberating eerily in my ears, not like a normal sound, but a muffled beat as though that of a body buried alive, under the blankets that is, or sounding like some stranger ominously pacing just beyond reach or reason, but attached to my very being, which of course it was; and as for the eye association, and acts of lucid insanity, those are stories for another day, now go to sleep