The short story by Edgar Allan Poe The Tell-Tale Heart is considered one of the most famous works and a classic example of gothic literature. It is interesting not only because of the tension a reader feels reading the story, but the style and approach of the writer to deliver the plot. It should be pointed out that the author was sure that short stories should be built according to the structure he used in The Tell-Tale Heart. The story is highly minimalistic: there is no description of the protagonist or settings, etc. Moreover, there is no hint on the issue of whether the main character is a man or a woman. On the contrary, Allan Poe described in the story the emotional state of the killer. So, the story tells about a person who killed an old man because the last one had a clouded, pale, blue “vulture-like” eye. The story is told by the killer: Alana Poe hints that the main character tells it to an inspector, an investigator, or somebody else. During the whole story, the protagonist tries to convince that he/she is not insane, still, his/her persuasion serves as the proof of the contrary: he/she suffers from some mental disease. Some experts admit that the problem the author uncovered was highly topical in the middle of the nineteenth century: the issue of whether an accused person who suffers from a mental illness should be reprieved or not.
The first word of the story is like the reply to the question of whether he/she was nervous before the murder: “True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe 110). It is obvious from the phrase that the main character is sure that he/she is not insane and the crime was just an effect of nervousness: “How then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe 110). One of the symptoms of delusion is the combination of clear consciousness and false propositions. The character clearly describes all that happened to him/her, but he/she cannot explain why he/she was irritated by the man’s eye. The character him/herself admit that he/she loved the man, and there was no motive to kill him: “Object there was none. Passion there was none” (Poe 110). Still, he/she was sure that he/she was in clear consciousness: delusion does not mean mental impairment. Mental illness is always accompanied by other mental diseases.
The main character heard different sounds: “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell”. Of course, this is not an argument to admit that the main character suffered from auditory hallucinations, it could sound outside. Still, there is evidence that proves the fact that the killer suffered from it. When the eighth time he/she came to the man’s room and saw his “vulture-like” eye he/she heard the sound of a beating heart: “there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton… It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage” (Poe 112). The same sound the killer heard when he/she was talking policemen. Still, the man with an “awful” eye was already dead. The main character was almost happy that the policemen did not find out that he/she killed somebody. He/she felt a triumph when he/she heard the sound which increased more and more. Perhaps, for him/her it was the sound from hell or heaven about which he/she told at the beginning of the story.
The combination of delusion and auditory hallucinations could be the reason for the character’s violence. As has been mentioned above, there were no reasons to kill the man; moreover, the killer lived him. However, such factors as the clouded, pale, blue “vulture-like” eye, and the sounds “form hell and heaven” became the stimulus of such behaviour. Many scientists admit that it is difficult to define why people commit violent crimes when there are no reasons for it. The short story is an illustration of the phenomenon when the combination of mental disorders provokes violation.
Work Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart and Other Tales. Massachusetts: Digireads.com Publishing, 2006. Print.