argumentative essay on the tell tale heart

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a Gothic novel in miniature. All of the elements of the Gothic novel are here: the subterranean secret, the Gothic space (scaled down from a full-blown castle to a single room), the gruesome crime – even the hovering between the supernatural and the psychological.

In just five pages, it’s as if Edgar Allan Poe has scaled down the eighteenth-century Gothic novel into a story of just a few thousand words. But what makes this story so unsettling?

Closer analysis reveals that ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ centres on that most troubling of things: the motiveless murder.

First, a brief summary of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. An unnamed narrator confesses that he has murdered an old man, apparently because of the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ which drove the narrator to kill him. He then describes how he crept into the old man’s bedroom while he slept and stabbed him, dragging the corpse away and dismembering it, so as to conceal his crime.

He goes to some lengths to cover up all trace of the murder – he even caught his victim’s blood in a tub, so that none was spilt anywhere – and then he takes up three of the floorboards of the chamber, and conceals his victim’s body underneath. But no sooner has he concealed the body than there’s a knock at the door: it’s the police, having been called out by a neighbour who heard a shriek during the night.

The narrator lets the police officers in to search the premises, and tells them a lie about the old man being away in the country. He keeps his calm while showing them around, until they go and sit down in the room below which the victim’s body is concealed.

The narrator and the police officers talk, but gradually the narrator begins to hear a ringing in his ears, a noise that becomes louder and more insistent. He believes that it is the beating of the dead man’s heart, taunting him from beyond the grave. Eventually, he can’t stand it any more, and tells the police to tear up the floorboards, the sound of the old man’s beating heart driving him to confess his crime.

The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is clearly unstable, as the end of the story reveals, but his mental state is questionable right from the start, as the jerky syntax of his narrative suggests:

True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The multiple dashes, the unusual syntactical arrangement, the exclamation and question marks: all suggest someone who is, at the very least, excitable. His repeated protestations that he is sane and merely subject to ‘over acuteness of the senses’ don’t fully convince: there is too much in his manner (to say nothing of his baseless murder of the old man) to suggest otherwise.

A motiveless crime?

And indeed, what makes ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ especially chilling – and here we might draw a parallel with another of Poe’s best-known tales, ‘The Black Cat’ – is that the killer freely confesses that his murder of the old man was a motiveless crime:

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! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees –  very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Murder is never justified, but it is sometimes understandable when a person has been driven to extremes and isn’t thinking clearly. But Poe’s narrator didn’t even kill the old man for something as cynical as financial gain. Even his proffered motive – the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ – is weak. He has to convince himself that that was why he did it, after the fact : ‘I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!’ (our emphasis).

One can imagine a police detective doing a double-take in the interview room. ‘You think it was his eye?’ This alone makes it clear that we are dealing with an unhinged mind, somebody who, to borrow from Bob Dylan, ‘killed for no reason’. Motiveless murderers are often the most unsettling.

Consider the ‘motiveless malignity’ of Iago , perhaps Shakespeare’s finest villain, who offers a number of potential motives for wanting to destroy the lives of Othello and Desdemona, and in doing so reveals that he very probably doesn’t have a real motive – other than wishing to cause trouble for the hell of it.

Poe and  Macbeth

But Othello is not Poe’s main Shakespearean intertext for ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Closer analysis of the story reveals that an important precursor-text to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, and probable influence on Poe, is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

Both texts centre on the murder of an ‘old man’; in both cases, the murderer is driven to feel guilt over his crime by being ‘haunted’ by his victim from beyond the grave (Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth , the old man’s beating heart in Poe’s story); both Macbeth and Poe’s narrator show signs of being at least a little mentally unstable; in both texts, the murder of the victim is followed by a knocking at the door.

But what makes Poe’s tale especially effective is the way he employs doubling to suggest that it is perfectly natural that the narrator should be paranoid about the sound coming from the floorboards. For before he had murdered the old man, the narrator had imagined his victim ‘trying to comfort himself’ when he heard a noise outside his bedroom:

All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.

But of course this is really the narrator projecting his own unease around sounds; and it thus foreshadows his later paranoia over the supposed sound coming from under the floorboards – the sound that will drive him to confess to his crime.

But along with the ‘motiveless’ nature of the narrator’s crime, the other aspect of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ which makes it such a powerful analysis of the nature of crime and guilt is the slight ambiguity hovering over that sound which taunts the narrator at the end of the story.

An ambiguous tale

It seems most likely that the sound exists only in his head, since the policemen are apparently oblivious to it as they continue to chat away calmly to the narrator. (This is the one real weak point in Poe’s story: once they’ve searched the premises they appear to hang around to make small talk with the narrator. Haven’t they got more important things to do? Unless the narrator isn’t as calm at this point as he believes, and they suspect foul play and are trying to get him to reveal something incriminating…)

But we cannot be entirely sure. Even if the sound is supernatural in origin – and Poe was obviously a master of the supernatural, as several of his other best stories attest – it may be that his victim is making his ghostly heartbeat heard only to the narrator, burrowing away deep within his mind.

But on balance we’re tempted to think that Poe, along with Dickens around the same time (compare the studied analysis of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit’s mind as he flees the scene), is pioneering a new kind of approach to the ‘ghost story’ here – one in which the ‘ghost’ is no more than a hallucination or phantom of the character’s mind.

Although such ambiguity had been used to good effect by Shakespeare, in the ghost story it is Poe, in such stories as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, who used this ambiguous plot detail to offer a deeper, more unsettling analysis of the nature of conscience.

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6 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”

Wonderful article! When I studied Poe in college my premise for one of my best papers centered on whether or not the murderer was sane or insane and even used “Methinks he protests too much” at the end. I believe I could’ve written several papers on this short story alone with several different topics. Again, wonderful article.

Thank you! Good Hamlet allusion too – one of the triumphs of Poe’s story, I think, is the instability of his narrator. Glad you enjoyed our analysis :)

Ahhhhh…and now here you have brought forth one of my most beloved tale tellers. Poe has influenced not only my own tales but my early life as well. Terrific analysis! The ambiguous nature of the conscience brought to fever pitch. :)

Thank you! It’s one of the real gems among Poe’s tales – and as you say, he’s a great tale-teller so there are quite a few to choose from :)

I’ve wondered if the heartbeat was the narrator’s own, since he was in a state of agitation and excitement while talking to the policemen. In any case, it’s a great story, and this is an interesting analysis.

• Pingback: A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ | Interesting Literature

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The Tell-Tale Heart: Character Analysis Argumentative Essay Examples

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Psychology , Heart , Nature , Mind , Literature , Character , Police , Edgar Allan Poe

Words: 1000

Published: 01/29/2020

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‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short stories. The story goes on to describe the murder of an old man by a man driven by his extreme insanity. Poe’s characters stand out and leave an ever-lasting mark on the minds of the innumerable readers. The narrator of the short story, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, recollects how he had killed an old man. He goes on to describe the story in first person narrative. How much of his description is true cannot be said and that makes him an unreliable narrator. He goes on chanting several times proclaiming his own sanity, a behavior bizarre enough. An engaged reader is bound to reason differently on account of this man’s behavior, logic and speech. From the very first sentence of the story, this man seems to be afraid. The jolting depiction of his state of mind very soon gets transformed into utter madness. He ardently goes on to claim of his fondness for the old man and that there can be no motive for killing him, except for his surmounting dislike of a cloudy film over one of his eyes. It actually seems that the narrator is unaware of the ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, living in his world of twisted perceived notions. The anonymity of this character symbolizes the universality of the weirdness. It looms over the mind like a specter and the reader is immersed much more into the intriguing narrative of the story. The narrator is emotionally unstable and hence this counters his claims of being a good judge of matters. His reactions are odd and do not comply with the standard expectations of the readers. His botheration about the vulture-like eye transcends his love for this old man and he finally murders him with premeditation. The act of killing brings a sense of accomplishment in this man. The policemen’s lack of suspicion signifies that the narrator himself had become unaware of his own mannerisms and surroundings. Being unable to maintain the distinction between the real and his inner thoughts, he misconstrues the mental disturbance for a physical one and the innocuous blabbering of the policemen seems to be malicious to him. However, all this while the narrator imagines that he has rightly translated all the events. Edgar Allan Poe, thus, suggests that irrationality of the mind roots from the belief in a person’s rational self. Ironically, his makes elevated proclamations describing him as too calm for being insane. But, it gets refuted by a noise that could be his heart beat. His unreliable nature makes it impossible for the reader to be certain if it is an actual sound, his imagination or something occult. The most reliable explanation can be that it was the sound of his own heart which he misconstrues as the heartbeat of the old man he had assassinated. The inability of distinguishing between parallels his lack of consciousness of his activities and he talks with the policemen. All these things expose his lapses in argument and thwart his claims of being sane. The character of the old man is much more mysterious that that of the narrator of the story. It might be due to the fact that the readers only get to see him through the perspective of the narrator. The man had a blue eye that the narrator was scared of. In the words of the narrator, the old man had no idea that he was going to be assassinated by the narrator for the fact that the narrator had treated him very cordially the week before. Though this claim cannot be substantiated with concrete proof, the old man’s leaving the bedroom door unlocked seems to point that only. He was not a naturally trusting man, as is evident from his fear of robbers. He, however, had a lot of trust on the narrator. It can be so that this man was extremely poor in judging characters as he had wrongly judged the narrator. It is evident from the narration that the old man’s senses had become dull with age. It was on the eighth night that he heard the narrator, apart from having almost no idea of the on-goings events around him. He is seriously incapable of showing any defense. It might be so that the narrator is craftily saying that he took the man as someone “mad”. This might have risen from the helplessly senile nature of the old man. Even thinking that the narrator could kill a man so tender with his ripe age makes the avid readers cringe. The alienation of the old man on account of his eye can be symbolic of the prevalent prejudices that bind the society in the shackles of evil and discriminate human beings on the parameter of physical “difference”. Poe is successful in stirring the minds of his avid readers with the bizarre and uncanny. The abnormality of the narrator meshes with the other characters and the readers are left flabbergasted at the end. Indeed, the character of the narrator in a plunge into the deep dark corners of human nature.

Works Cited

Broda, Anna. "Odd and Deviant Behaviour in Selected Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O'Connor." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. Fludernik, Monika. "An Introduction to Narratology." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. Friedrichsen, Mike. "Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations." Google Books. Ed. Peter Vorderer and Hans Jürgen Wulff. N.p., Ogden, Thomas. "Subjects of Analysis." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. Silverman, Kenneth. "New Essays on Poe's Major Tales." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 28. Mar. 2013.

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The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) Essay

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Introduction

Character analysis, plot summary, internal versus external forces, works cited.

The introductory part will present the The Tell- Tale heart (1843), by Alan Edgar Poe, introducing the main characters viz. the narrator and the old man. The story opens with the unknown narrator confessing he is restless but not harebrained or insane, as some would want to think.

He narrates his story by defending his sound mind although he has murdered an innocent old man. The narrator lives with the old man; however, he claims that his supposedly housemate has an evil blue eye that evokes fear in him (the narrator). At this point, the narrator is not trustworthy because he does not even understand himself; he does not know whether he is psychologically sick or he is just another murderer.

This section tackles the main characters of the story and as aforementioned, the narrator and the old man are the only central characters in the story. The narrator is untrustworthy, self-righteous and a rigid person who leaves no space for learning.

He believes he is sane despite the fact that he kills the old man for no apparent reason. His sanctimonious overtones infringe is trustworthiness. On the other hand, the old man is just a victim of malice or covered insanity.

The plot summary will outline the flow of the story where once more the narrator plays the central role. As the story opens, the narrator insinuates he is insane by declaring he has a story to tell; however, the story is a defense to guard his sanity. Therefore, the events of this section will focus on the narrator as he puts forward his claims of sanity.

However, to understand where all the sanity ‘noises’ are coming from, this section will flashback to the one event that seems to infringe the narrator’s insanity; the murder of the old man. Again, the narrator’s trustworthiness is compromised for by defending his actions, he unknowingly exposes his unreliability.

The overriding theme in this story is the theme of paranoia. As the story opens, the narrator acknowledges that he is nervous for reasons he does not know. The thin, almost confusing, or blurred line between paranoia and madness comes out clearly. People think paranoia is synonymous to madness and perhaps this explains why the narrator is vehement in defending his sanity.

Paranoia in this context also underscores the blurred line between hate and love according to Benfey (78). Ironically, many a time individuals hurt the closest people in their lives. In this section, the narrator is trustworthy; he loves and needs the old man, yet he kills him.

Ironically, the presence of police officers who come to investigate the murder of the old man does not evoke any uneasiness in the narrator. However, the deafening sounds of fear and guilt that haunt the narrator seem to take away his peace. The narrator does not confess the murder because the offices push him; no, he confesses because of guilt and self-conviction.

At this point, the story tries to emphasize that internal forces are stronger than external forces. One can defy and deny external forces like rule of law; however, defying self-conviction is tantamount to committing suicide and the narrator comes out as a trustworthy source of this scenario.

The concluding part of the essay will try to piece together the ideas raised in the story. Running from introduction, though plot summary to themes; this section will give a concise recap of the whole story.

Benfey, Christopher. “Poe and the Unreadable: ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.” New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales . United States: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Poe, Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, 1992. Web.

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IvyPanda . "The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)." May 28, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-tell-tale-heart-1843/.