Hello again, friends! I have decided to talk about yet another story by Edgar Allan Poe. It seems that I talk about him a lot, huh. Well, he is one of my favorite writers, and this is probably my favorite story of his.

So let’s dig into “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

We open with our unnamed narrator assuring us that he’s totally not crazy, you guys. So that’s reassuring. We then get into why this guy is insisting that he’s not crazy. It doesn’t really make him look more sane, though.

So, the narrator is rooming with this old dude. Things are going pretty well and he actually gets along pretty well with his roommate, except for one tiny little detail. See, the old guy has one kind of jacked-up eye that really creeps the narrator out. So he comes to a totally rational conclusion.

He decides to kill him roommate.

But he’s not going to go into this all half-cocked. No, see, he has a plan. And that plan involves sneaking into the old man’s room every night at midnight, then shinin a lantern on his face to see if the eye is open. Because it wouldn’t be fair to kill him if his eye’s closed. Wouldn’t really be fair to kill him over a feature he has no control over, either, but here we are.

This goes on for eight nights. On the eighth night, though, the narrator’s thumb slips when he’s trying to open the lantern which wakes the old dude up. This results in the narrator standing in the darness for an hour waiting for him to go back to sleep. This doesn’t happen, and the narrator gets impatient and decides to shine the light on him anyway.

This time the old man’s eye is actually open. Because he’s awake. And freaked out by the noise. Anyway, the two of them proceed to stare at each other for several minutes, until the narrator is sufficiently enraged by the eye and smothers the old man with his own bed. He then dismembers the corpse and shoves it under the floorboards.

There’s just one small problem, though: a neighbor heard the old man scream just before the narrator got to smothering, and called the cops. This, of course, results in three cops knocking on his door.

The narrator’s not too worried, though, because he’s confident that hes managed to clear up all the evidence of his crime. He tells him the scream was him, from a nightmare, and that the old man is out of town currently, before inviting them in to search the place.

The cops, of course, find nothing, and the narrator decides to push his luck a little further and invites them to sit and chat for a while  brings in a few chairs. In what can only be described as big dick energy he puts his own chair over the spot where he hid the corpse.

So the four of them are havin a pretty lively conversation when the narrator starts hearing a pounding noise from the floorboards, like a heartbeat. The noise starts to get progressively louder, but the three officers don’t seem to hear it. It gets to the point where the narrator thinks they’re toying with him.

Eventually, he can’t take it anymore, and the story closes on what is probably its most well-known line:

“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

As I mentioned above, this is probably my favorite of Poe’s stories, I think because it may have been the first one I ever read when I was a kid. It’s delightfully suspenseful, and that last line is fantastic.

It also presents us with a narrator who may not be entirely reliable. There’s his insistence, for instance, that he’s not mad, but that seems to be contradicted by his actions. He my not be telling the entire truth about his motives as well, since killing someone over a mild deformity seems a bit extreme. There’s one interpretation that the old man’s eye may actually be representative of some power the old man has over the narrator.

Also, Poe seems to really enjoy writing about assholes, as a lot of his protagonists are not great people. Just a pattern I’ve noticed.

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