Unreliable Narration “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

The unnamed narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe almost immediately reveals himself to be unreliable and untrustworthy, in terms of his ability to present events as they actually are. The narrator claims he killed an old man because of the man’s evil eye. But his description of the eye suggests that he believes that the eye almost has disembodied evil, a life of its own beyond that of the old man himself. “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” (Poe). The narrator becomes fixated on minutiae, upon the eye, rather than upon any logical harm that could be perpetuated by the eye.

The narrator also continually contradicts himself. He claims to have loved the old man and had no desire for money (in fact, he does not steal from the old man). “He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult” (Poe). The murder seems to be motivated by a peculiar desire by the murderer to prove his own cleverness and his own sanity. His first words to the reader deny the charge of madness, which suggest that after the murder was discovered, he was found to be insane by a court of law. “…but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them” (Poe). The narrator seems more intent upon proving his sanity than preserving his own life. He claims that his impressions are purely due to his over-active senses; in other words, that he has more insight than the average person, rather than less.

This is belied by his actions, which seem to be clearly irrational, even for someone who wishes to commit a murder. For example, rather than killing the old man outright, the narrator instead visits him for several nights, always withdrawing before he cannot be seen. Again, he seems to harbor the delusion that it is the old man’s eye, not the old man himself that is generating his sense of unease. “And this I did for seven long nights --every night just at midnight --but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (Poe). This is strangest delusions, that somehow if he kills the old man with the man’s eyes shut, he will merely kill the old man, not the eye that bothers him.
The story concludes with the man revealing his crime to the police, even after he has convinced them that the old man is still alive. He hears a heart beating under the floorboards, where he has buried the man. Because it is so loud, he believes it is impossible not to hear its throbbing. The reader, of course, is aware of the fact that it is the narrator’s own heart. But because the narrator is so convinced that everyone can hear the beating, he reveals what he did. This may also be the source of his insistence that his senses are over-acute; although he may have learned later that the police were not mocking him as he believed at the time and did not hear anything, he is still convinced that his impressions are correct.

The narrator appears to be suffering from a form of paranoid schizophrenia which makes him unable to rationally evaluate his situation and which causes auditory and visual hallucinations as well as disordered thinking (Salas). Even though the narrator understands that his behavior will have consequences, he seems to genuinely believe he is being persecuted by the eye and is unable to differentiate right from wrong. As well as a portrait of madness, a number of critics have also used the story as evidence of the “ambiguity” of the “complicated dynamics of criminal confessions by mentally ill suspects” and of the problematic nature of using what a mentally ill suspect testifies in securing a conviction (Salas)

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 1848. Web. 6 April 2018. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html

Salas, Claudio. “The Case for Excluding the Criminal Confessions of the Mentally Ill.”

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 16 (1). Web. 6 April 2018. http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol16/iss1/7