Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Tell-Tale Heart in 1843. It is a short horror story depicting the murder of an old man by an unnamed person, the story’s narrator. The narrator shows signs of paranoia, mania, and auditory hallucinations. The setting is a house where both characters live, while most action takes place in the old man’s chamber. The plot can be divided into three parts: the justification for the murder, the criminal act, and the confession. Poe uses an unreliable narrator to explore the themes of paranoia, obsession, and hallucinations.
Although the narrator denies his insanity in the first part of the story, it is evident that he has a mental disorder. He says: “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell” (Poe, 2021, para. 1). Denial of being insane when hearing voices is a common occurrence. Furthermore, the story’s exposition is the narrator’s maniacal monologue describing the old man’s vulture-like eye planning to kill him for that. The narrator spies on the sleeping old man for seven nights without killing him because “the Evil Eye” is closed (Poe, 2021, para. 2). The action escalates on the eighth night when the narrator finally sees the eye.
The criminal act is a meticulous and gruesome ritual to satisfy the narrator’s obsession. The narrator feels the old man’s fear, hears his heartbeats, and reads his thoughts, reveling in these sensations (Poe, 2021). In this scene, killing him is a compulsion provoked not only by the eye but by the loudening heartbeats that the narrator perceives as a threat. He thinks in terror: “…the sound would be heard by a neighbor!” (Poe, 2021, para. 11). The story’s climax is when the narrator seemingly frees himself of the madness and precautionary hides the body.
Finally, the confession part reveals that the narrator cannot escape his ‘demons.’ It all appears normal until the narrator hears “the beating of…hideous heart” (Poe, 2021, para. 18). The insanity returns with worsened symptoms, and it all comes to square one. In the story’s resolution, the narrator admits to the policemen that he killed the old man because of sickening compulsion.
In conclusion, The Tell-Tale Heart by Poe studies mental illness’s effect on an individual. Three parts of the plot represent different stages of disorder: onset, development, and compulsion. In the end, Poe shows how mental illness is cyclical. Using an unreliable narrator, Poe emulates mental disorder from the first-person perspective. It enables the reader to submerge into paranoia and mania virtually feel their horrors.
Reference
Poe, E. A. (2021). The tell-tale heart. The Poe Museum. Web.