The Tell Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart” was written in 1843 by Edgar Allan Poe. Begins with the famous line

“True! — Nervous — very, very nervous I had been, and am; but way

Will you say that I am mad?” The narrator insists that his disease has

Sharpened, not dulled, his senses. He tells the tale of how an old man who lives in his house has

never wronged him. For an unknown reason, the old man’s cloudy, pale blue eye has incited

madness in the narrator. Whenever the old man looks at him, his blood turns cold. Thus, he is

determined to kill him to get rid of this curse.

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Poe uses his words economically in the “Tell-Tale Heart” it is one of his shortest stories to

provide a study of paranoia and mental deterioration. Poe strips the story of excess detail as a

way to heighten the murderer’s obsession with specific and unadorned entities: the old man’s

eye, the heartbeat, and his own claim to sanity. Poe’s economic style and pointed language thus

contribute to the narrative content, and perhaps this association of form and content truly

exemplifies paranoia. Even Poe himself, like the beating heart, is complicit in the plot to catch

the narrator in his evil game.

As a study in paranoia, this story illuminates the psychological contradictions that contribute to a

murderous profile. For example, the narrator admits, in the first sentence, to being dreadfully

nervous, yet he is unable to comprehend why he should be thought mad. He articulates his self-

defense against madness in terms of heightened sensory capacity. Unlike the similarly nervous

and hypersensitive Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” who admits that he feels

mentally unwell, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” views his hypersensitivity as proof of his

sanity, not a symptom of madness. This special knowledge enables the narrator to tell this tale in

a precise and complete manner, and he uses the stylistic tools of narration for...