Misperceptions and the Tell Tale Heart of Poe

Unreliable narration in "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe is an example of a horror story which primarily evolves through the use of psychological drama. The central protagonist commits a murder and is compelled to confess by his hallucination that the dead man's heart is still beating beneath the floorboards where he interred him, even though the narrator is really likely only hearing his own heart throbbing away. The story demonstrates how the human mind can create its own prison and how subjective human experience can be: what the protagonist perceives is not actually the truth despite his insistence he is sane: "How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

The unreliable character of the protagonist is established early on, which immediately makes the reader suspicious of his justification of the murder in the first place. "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." The narrator admits that the old man never did anything to harm him and even paradoxically claims that he loved the old man, when in fact he murdered him in cold blood. "It was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye," he insists.

The antagonist of the story is not the old man but rather the unnamed protagonist's mind. At some level, the protagonist seems to be aware of the fact that he is insane because consistently throughout the story he tries to make an ultimately unconvincing case for his sanity. He claims that the deliberate nature of the manner in which he planned the crime and concealed himself from the old man is evidence of sanity. "You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded --with what caution --with what foresight --with what dissimulation I went to work!"

The grisly manner in which he dispenses of the corpse the narrator also claims is evidence of his sanity, even though to the reader it likely seems barbaric. "If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs." The emphasis on dismemberment seems consistent with the narrator's tendency to focus on pieces of things and people, rather than upon the whole. First he focuses on the man's supposedly evil eye, next upon the beating of the man's heart which haunted him when he killed him. "But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me --the sound would be heard by a neighbour!" The narrator's paranoia, anxiety, and distorted perceptions all clearly mark him as having a delusional disorder and Poe's expert use of characterization ensures that the reader can see a clear discrepancy between how the narrator perceives himself and reality.

The sound of the beating in the narrator's mind does not go away. Even when the other characters do not think that anything is amiss, he is unable to let go of the idea that the man's heart is continuing to beat, just like he was unable to let go of the idea that the man had a curse, evil eye. This also shows Poe's consistency of characterization: the narrator is not simply randomly mad and delusional; his obsessions have a clear pattern. He also seems able to display a surface appearance of normalcy since the old man never suspected that the narrator was plotting to kill him and the police officers initially seem to be taken in by the narrator's story that it was he that cried out in the night, not the old man. "I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men --but the noise steadily increased."