Summary: How Edgar Allan Poe Is Making the Narrator Sound Relatable In The The Tell-Tale Heart

In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe throws the reader right into the mind of the unknown narrator’s grim endeavor. The speaker in the story tries to convince the reader that he is sane, and that no insane person would be able to come up with a plan as elaborately as his. There is a man that the narrator describes as having an “Evil Eye” which he’s been watching “every night, about midnight” so that he can murder this eye that he believes has been threatening him.

One night, the speaker accidentally wakes the old man and finds the eye staring at him, making him angry. The pounding heart of the old man overwhelmed the narrator, and he eventually murders the man and places his corpse beneath the floorboards in the house. As he is doing this, the police show up at the door because of a tip they received from a neighbor about a loud yell.

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The narrator allows them inside the house and places his chair over where the dead body is under the floor. As the police are talking and laughing, the speaker can only focus on the beating heart he thinks he hears; he believes the policemen can hear it too and that they are making fun of him. Poe ends the story with the narrator cracking under the perceived pressure and dramatically pleads guilty to the crime he has committed.

While reading this story, I immediately fell in love with the way that it is written in such realistic first-person perspective.

Poe did an excellent job in making the narrator sound relatable–I think we have all tried to convince people that we are not insane. In this case, we find out that the narrator is insane after all and I think he ends up being eaten alive by the guilt he feels about the murder he has committed. What also makes it relatable is the anxiety that builds within the story. The narrator is obviously struggling with some internal struggles with what is real and what is not––leaving the reader in this unsafe place as we are carried through his actions with him. Poe starts the story without any type of introduction or explanation as to who the speaker is, who the victim is, or even what the “disease” is. The reader is ultimately left to wonder about these things, and is also left to wonder–what purpose did Edgar Allan Poe want this piece to serve?

The story ultimately seems to be about mental illness and emotions of pure confidence as well as pure guilt. Poe may have written this story to shed light on the struggles of someone with mental illness, as he himself struggled with this and alcoholism. The narrator seems to have schizophrenia because of the way he sees things that aren’t there (the evil eye) and how he hears things that probably aren’t being said (the police making fun of him). I think it’s interesting that Poe created this character solely to tear him down; the narrator is quite sure of himself at the beginning and pretty much brags about what he is about to do, but then it all spirals downward and ends with a massive breakdown of the character we (and he) thought was so “clever”. I think the horrifying thing about the story is that we might be so sure of ourselves but can, in an instant, be broken down and eaten alive by our imperfections––or that we are limited and biased by how we see things in our own heads.