The burden of guilt: A story review to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart is a well-crafted short story.
But before I tell you about how fascinating and beautifully written the story is, let me first introduce you to the writer, Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died in October 1849. He was a poet, writer, editor, and literary critic from the United States. He was well-known for his interest in mystery and the macabre.
He has a unique writing style that uses different elements of literary structure and he also uses vocabulary and imagery to capture the reader’s attention. This writing style of him can be seen in his other works such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”.
Try reading his other works. I guarantee you’ll like it.
So, back to the story we go.
The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story about a murderer’s confession, who also happens to be the narrator of the short tale. He attempts to persuade the readers that he is sane and that the crime he committed was justified, but in doing so exposes more about his insanity than the crime itself.
The narrator started off the story by talking to another person, presumably a policeman or an investigator. That’s what I thought at first but there is a high chance that he is indeed just talking to himself. Given that his insanity had long been descended after the crime he did.
He then goes on to tell the readers that he doesn’t hate the old man. In fact, he loved him because the old man had done nothing wrong to him. But, he also mentioned the eyes of the old man, pale blue “vulture-like” eyes.
He said that old’s man eye gave him a strange, cold feeling when he looked at him. He hated that eye, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that he also hated the old man. The eyes make his blood cold as ice and he decided that the only way to get rid of that vulture eye was to kill the old man so that it could never look at him again.
The narrator continued the story by saying that he’s not mad because a madman could not execute an almost perfect plan.
He then explains how friendly he is to the old man for the week. And that at night, he would creep into his room. Waiting for a chance to kill the vulture eyes. He did this for seven days straight, however, he was unable to because the old man had his eyes closed.
It was the eye that urges him to kill the old man, not the old man himself.
It is on the 8th day that the old man wakes up from his sleep. He can feel the narrator’s presence in his room and even cries out with fear. The narrator — who saw the vulture eyes for the first time in a week — had finally enabled himself to murder those evil eyes.
After murdering the old man, he chopped the body and put it under the floorboards. He heard some knocks on the door and it was some police officers. The police came because a neighbor heard a strange sound — the old’s man shriek — coming from the old man’s house.
It’s 4 o’clock in the morning so it's still dark but the narrator invited the policemen inside the house with the confidence that he’ll not be caught. But, suddenly as they were talking he heard a thumping sound. He thought that the policemen are playing pranks on him when they said they didn’t hear anything.
The sound worsens and worsens and he realized that the thumping sound was the old’s man heart. It grew louder and louder until he cried, confessing to the crime he had done while pointing to the floorboards where the mutilated body of the old man lays.
What a story, right?
It’s a strong and extremely disturbing story.
The main theme of this short story is guilt. It shows us that even an insane person can feel some sort of guilt although it’s not the same with normal people. The narrator tried so hard to convince the readers that he's not insane, when in fact he had mistaken his own heartbeat for the old man’s, thus, proving to us that he indeed felt guilty for murdering an innocent old man.
The story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is packed with a lot of symbolism. And here are two major symbols in the story.
- The old’s man eye is the symbol of evil. Which will eventually manipulate the narrator so much that he would plot to murder the old man, despite also insisting that the narrator loves the old man and has never felt wronged by him.
- The beating heart is the symbol of the narrator’s guilt and conscience for the crime he had committed. He had mistaken his own heartbeat for that of the old man’s which prompt him to reveal the horrible deed to the policemen.
In the narrator’s opinion, separating the “vulture eye” from the old man, whom he claims to love, provides a justification for killing the innocent man. It facilitates his murder and relieves him of the burden of guilt.
At least, that’s what he believed, but the beating of his heart reveals him and exposes the depths of his insanity.