“The Tell-Tale Heart”: A Story of Disturbance

It’s one thing to be terrified.

It’s another thing to be disturbed.

As perhaps the most famous of Edgar Allan Poe’s renowned horror stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” has probably terrified plenty of people. All of those people are better off than the story’s narrator, though. He’s not terrified; he’s disturbed.

Are you?

On the Defense

You probably already know this story, which has been assigned in countless high school and college classes. It’s not Poe’s greatest story, but it has the advantages of being short and accessible, and its symbolism, imagery, and point of view make it a convenient exercise in literary interpretation.

If you remember anything about the story, it’s probably the final scene, which can be interpreted, somewhat simplistically, as the triumph of the narrator’s conscience. Before we get to that scene, however, let’s consider some other key features, which can lead us toward a deeper understanding of the story, of disturbance, and of ourselves.

The opening paragraph is a provocative one, suitable for a story about disturbance:

TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Harken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

Here is someone telling his own story. First-person narrators are not all that unusual in American literature, especially in Poe’s own work, but there are a couple of notable aspects of this introduction. For one thing, the narrator, for a number of reasons, comes across as deranged. He claims to hear things in hell, after all. For this reason, he is what we call an “unreliable narrator,” someone whose story we may not entirely trust. For the purposes of this column, I am assuming that we can take at least some of his account at face value, but keep in mind that the existence of an unreliable narrator opens up an entirely new realm of interpretation.

Then there’s the reference to the narrator’s audience: “but why will you say that I am mad?” Who is the “you” here?

Given the way the story plays out, we might naturally assume that this second-person pronoun refers to a police officer interrogating him after the events took place. That strikes me as a sound interpretation, but we should bear in mind that Poe could write his fiction in such a way that it can be interpreted multiple ways. As readers of the story, we ourselves are also an audience for his story and thus can be the “you” here, as well. It’s also easy to imagine that the narrator, in his unstable state, is talking to himself. As I mentioned in my recent two-part series on “Ulalume,” Poe was obsessed with doubles, including the two sides of the human brain. He could be talking to himself just as the narrator of “Ulalume” was talking to Psyche, his soul.

Whoever the audience is, the narrator’s stance is telling. Twice he challenges the assumption that he is mad, and he strives to make a case for his sound mental state, saying, “Harken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” He will go on to make his case a little later, saying, “Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me.”

I can imagine that many readers have considered this narrator paranoid. At the very least, he is defensive. This stance aligns with what I consider the key theme of the story.

The Evil Eye

If the first paragraph reveals the narrator’s defensiveness, the next zeroes in on an even deeper part of his psychology:

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 insult. 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 degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

We might not be surprised that a madman would become fixated on a single object that would seem innocuous to the rest of us, even feeling “haunted” by this thing, but this is one of Poe’s stories, so we need to consider the possibility of symbolism. What does an eye do? It sees, of course, and why would anyone worry about something that sees? If this person already strikes us as abnormally defensive, the reason very well might be fear of exposure—that is, exposure of something for which he feels guilt or shame. This narrator, in short, seems to have something to hide, and the old man’s eye, to him anyway, seems a threat because it would seem to be watching him and possibly even seeing whatever makes him feel guilty or shameful.

The description of his victim as an “old man” may be significant, as well. Can you think of a figure who is often depicted as an old man and who also can see and even judge? Yep, that would be God, as characterized in the Christian tradition.

Later, the narrator refers not only to an eye, but to an “Evil Eye.” This phrase in particular suggests a second meaning for “eye,” which sounds exactly like “I.” Perhaps what the narrator really hates and wants to destroy is his own self. He may think of the eye as external, the eye of God or of his fellow human beings, who will judge him for what he has done or is doing, but he is also watching himself, so, paradoxically, he may want to destroy himself, not only as an internal judge of his behavior, but also as the one responsible for this behavior. After all, he identifies with the old man in multiple ways, as in this account of their parallel experiences of terror:

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew that it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain, or of grief — oh, no! — it was the low, stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me.

Killing this alter ego, in short, could be a twisted means of destroying his own self.

Self-destruction

This reading helps to explain the story’s final scene. The narrator has murdered the old man and buried him under the floorboards. Some police officers appear at the door, and the narrator confidently invites them to search the house, indeed to “search well.” After they find nothing, he and the officers wind up sitting down and having a chat. Although they show no signs of suspecting him, the narrator, driven to distraction by what he thinks is the sound of the beating of the dead man’s heart, confesses to the crime.

Since the heart inside a corpse typically doesn’t beat, we can assume that the sound the narrator has heard is that of his own heart, probably beating all the more noticeably because of his heightened nerves in this situation. In any case, his confession amounts to a form of self-destruction and thus another, more direct example of his attempt to rid himself of the Evil I.

From Disturbance to Equilibrium

Poe is widely regarded as the quintessential horror writer, but, as “The Tell-Tale Heart” shows, he could take on something even worse than horror. The feeling of horror tends to be short and to focus on an external threat—a ghost or a madman, perhaps. Horror is what the old man feels when he hears the sound of the narrator’s lantern in the night.

Disturbance is ongoing and, in this case, it wells up from inside the narrator’s own self. The word disturb, according to the etymology in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, came to English from Latin, where disturbare meant “to throw into disorder.” In contemporary English, when we say that someone is “disturbed,” we mean that something in their mental state is essentially out of order. This narrator is disturbed in the sense that he is not functioning in what most of us would consider a normal state. What is normal for most of us is probably not absolute tranquillity, but at least equilibrium—enough calmness, that is, to get on with life without, say, wanting to attack a roommate’s “Evil Eye.”

Like the “The Tell-Tale Heart,” some of Poe’s other works of “horror” are also works of disturbance: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Raven.” Perhaps this is the reason such works are so, well, disturbing. By evoking the thought of deep dis-ease, they plant a seed in our own brains, perhaps drawing our attention to the tiniest of cracks—like the fissure running down the front of the House of Usher—in our mental states.

Most of us are not disturbed, but all of us feel disturbed at one time or another. It’s worth considering the sources of disturbance—social media comes to mind—and addressing them with some self-awareness, healthful habits, and scientifically backed strategies.

While Poe can help us identify the things that go bump in our head, one of my other favorite writers, Benjamin Franklin, is an invaluable source of wisdom for addressing and overcoming these and other problems in our minds and lives. As we approach the New Year, I invite you to check out my “Better with Ben” series from a few years ago. It can help you achieve some equilibrium and more.

We don’t have to live like one of Poe’s characters, taking aim at an Evil I. With the right approach, we can leave the disturbing things on the page and thrive with much better things in our heads.