The Tell Tale Heart

Short Story: The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

        Concerning the plot, “The Tell-Tale Heart” describes, from the perspective of his own point of view, a man who is suffering after doing something terrible - he has killed a man. Thus, the short story is constructed around this major character and his state of mind, leaving us the task of unveiling him and the whole story he is telling.

 In the very beginning, at his firsts phrases, the narrator already present the question of his madness, saying that he has a disease, but one that “had sharpened” his senses, “not destroyed, not dulled them”. It is his first attempt of convincing the readers that he has not done what he has done - committed the murder, but we can not know that at this moment - because he is crazy or insane. And he goes beyond that when he invites us to pay attention to his story and make our own conclusions - that he thinks will be the same as his. This can be seen at the end of the first paragraph: “Hearken! And observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story”.  

So he begins by telling how he had no motive, no object, no passion involved on his wrong doing. “I loved the old man”, he tells, seeking to reassure that. But the old man had a problem - an “volture eye” - that haunted and stressed the narrator to the point of committing the murder, which he narrates in detail: the nights that he had spent going to the old man room but never being able to proceed; the days after, in which he met the old man and it was nothing was happening; and then the night of the murder. With no motive but “his Evil Eye” and at the sight of it in the deep night, the narrator kills the old man by pressing him under his bad, after an hour of tension between the two of them, and hides the body beneath the floor. He thinks everything is ok - and tries to make us believe that - until his bell rings.

REFERÊNCIA BIBLIOGRÁFICA

POE, Edgar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart. Available at < http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html >. Accessed on: June 25th, 2019.