The Tell-Tale Heart [short story]

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

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

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

Here we have a narrator who keeps telling the reader he's not mad yet in doing so he comfirms his insanity!

When I spotted this book at the Newtown Library annual book sale in the summer of 2017, I was psyched. Here was a chance to read some old favorites and discover other stories that I hadn't read before. I likened it to picking up an album by a band who you only knew by their greatest hits but wanted to dive deeper into their discography. So when October rolled around last year, it seemed the perfect time to re-visit Poe.

This collection kicks off with "The Tell-Tale Heart," probably Poe's most famous work. It's followed by "The Black Cat," which I'd never read before, and I was surprised by its graphic nature. My all-time favorite Poe story, "The Cask of Amontillado," followed, and my opinion of it was untarnished. "The Fall of the House show more of Usher" and "The Masque of the Red Death" completed the set of familiar hits. Now I was to enter the area of the unfamiliar. While I'd heard of a couple others in the collection, I hadn't had a chance to read them.

I don't want to bore you with analysis of each story, so I will summarize my disappointment.

Poe is credited with creating the first modern detective stories, beating out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes by over forty years. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" were two of the mysteries included here. Unfortunately, they were all "tell" and no "show." We have to endure a blowhard detective lording over anyone who will listen how he solved the case. The stories are all "reveal." It would've been far more enjoyable to experience the stories as the detective discovered clues. Doyle and Christie would eventually figure out how to do it right.

A few of the stories were treated as fictional testimonials whereupon the narrator related some strange incident or horrifying experience. I think the hook here was to ensnare gullible readers of Poe's time to believe these sensational accounts were really true, maybe drive up newspaper sales. While the events and particulars would change, the stories shared the same structure and struck me as formulaic. And the purple prose! It got to the point where it was so cloying, so thick, that I had to take breaks from it. I could scarcely finish a page without suffocating from its soporific embellishment into a slumber so deep that only the vigorous applause of Conan's studio audience emanating from the television speaker could rouse me.

Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Apparently purple prose is contagious. Anyway, Lovecraft would later go on to master these techniques, though now I'm worried that I might no longer enjoy his work.

The collection of stories ends with "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," which embodies all of my objections. It's 161 pages of Mr. Pym's epic sea voyage. It starts as a drunken kidnapping then turns into a shipwreck. Apparitions, sharks, and cannibalism all make an appearance. But after Mr. Pym is rescued, he doesn't return home, but instead journeys with the rescuing ship south. Now at this time, there was still some uncertainty about the existence of Antarctica as a continent, so Poe took advantage of that to do some Hollow Earth extrapolation. And the abrupt ending is neither mysterious nor satisfying.

From here, the collection moves on to Poe's poetry. While a good deal of it is adequate, "The Raven" is his true masterpiece and stands head and shoulders above the rest in not only subject matter, but form and execution.

Ultimately, it took me a year to get through this collection. I'm embarrassed that it took so long. What started out as a promising journey through literary nostalgia took a horrible turn into musty, archaic manuscripts that—Crap! I'm doing it again. [Sigh] So I'm left with giving this collection just three stars. Before you hate on me, I'll admit that it's me, not him. While there are plenty who still appreciate his style, I think my preferences are now too modern. Maybe Poe is now someone who should only be read in small doses—a story here, a story there—and to be appreciated every Halloween. show less