Title: The Tell-Tale Heart
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Reviewer: Andrew Bula
In the short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Edgar Allan Poe gives a striking portraiture of the nature of evil and its manifestation in a human being. The story basically revolves round two principal characters: the unnamed narrator who symbolizes evil, and hurt innocence as exemplified by the old man. But one should hasten to ask: how can an ‘old man’ be said to be innocent? In truth, as human beings are weak and prone to err, one cannot rightly think an old man innocent. No! But, at least, in the context of the short story, this interpretation that the old man is innocent has complete validity. For nowhere in the short story is there a trace of the old man giving offence to his murderer, the narrator. If anything, the narrator himself speaks of the old man in vindicating terms: “He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult”. Curiously, these lines of text are extracted from a whole paragraph that reveals sheer lack of tolerance by the narrator for his neighbour, the old man; the pointlessness of his disdain towards the old man, and the absolute innocence of the old man against whom evil is committed.
Writes the narrator:
It is impossible to say how first the idea
entered my brain; but
once conceived, it haunted me day and
night. Object there was
none. Passion there was none. I loved
the old man. He had never
wronged me. He had never given me in
sult. 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 de
grees ─very gradually ─ I made
up my mind to take the life of the old
man, and thus rid myself of
the eye forever.
The “idea” referred to in the first sequence of this testimony is, of course, one of killing the old man. And it is as illogical as it is downright preposterous, isn’t it, for the narrator to claim to love the old man and yet hate, as he variously describes it, the old man’s “vulture eye”, or “Evil eye” or “damned spot” so much so that he plots to kill him and eventually does so. To great dismay, even after he kills the old man, the unnamed murderer doesn’t stop there; he cruelly cuts the corpse into pieces: head, arms, and legs, detached from the torso! Again, the old man did not wrong him. And though the old man had gold in his possession, the narrator unequivocally confesses that this was not his craving. His longing was quite simply to kill the old man and, as a consequence, stop the irritation of seeing the old man’s defective eye. And kill him the narrator did. This old man who, being already spent, any slight failing in his health might tip over his life, is not left alone to cling onto what little is left of him!
Eventually, upon his death, even though the narrator cleverly tucks away the remains of the old man, believing that no one would ever know where it is, the beating of the old man’s corpse’s heart is so loud that it exposes him as the culprit to the police officers who came investigating, having been informed by some neighbour that something criminal had happened the night before. This is where Poe derives the title of his story, “the tell-tale heart”. The word “telltale” means showing that something which is a secret exists. Taken together, “The Tell-tale Heart”, as the title of the short story, means the old man’s heart that reveals the secret of a murder committed.
Indeed, it is totally untrue that a dead man’s heart would beat, leaving aside the question of it beating so loud that it uncovers a secret. But this, sometimes, is the way of fiction. In spite of this falsehood, it is safe to say that in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, as in other works of fiction, we can truly learn something of the world in which we live.
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