Interviewer: Enze
Edgar Allan Poe: Gordon
[Setting: Room with a table and some sofas. Interviewer is sitting on a sofa]
Enze: Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to “Little Literature.” Today, with the help of the author, we’re going to discuss and answer questions from readers across the world about “The Tell Tale Heart,” a famous short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. Born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, he is an American writer, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tale of mystery and the macabre. He started out as an orphan, and raised by the wealthy Allan family. When he became an adult, he Without further ado, let’s have a round of applause
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They shake hands, and sit]
Enze: Welcome to “Little Literature”, and thank you for being with us today Mr. Poe.
Gordon: Pleasure to meet you. Please, call me Edgar. I would believe that Mr. Poe is my father who was an alcoholic and had abandoned me when I was young… So please, call me Edgar.
Enze: Alright Edgar. So tonight we’re talking about one of you’re short stories, “The Tell Tale Heart,” in which the narrator murders an old man because of his eye. He then completely fools the police officers when they come to investigate until they all sit down to chat in the old man’s bedroom. However, later on when the narrator starts hearing a terrible ticking noise, which gets louder and louder until finally the narrator freaks out and confesses to the police.
Gordon: That is correct. In the end, the murderer also reveals the old man's body to the police, stating that the terrible sound is coming from the old man’s heart.
Enze: Yes. Let’s officially start the questioning session with a letter from…
[Interviewer fumbles with
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“Dear Edgar Allan Poe, I can’t believe I’m going to watch you listen to my letter in this show! I absolutely love this story because it’s so intriguing. My question is how do we interpret the role of the old man’s beating heart in this story?”
Gordon: Well, just like how the story is titled, the old man’s heart is telling tales to the narrator. We first hear the old man’s heart beating on the eighth night that the narrator stalks him, when he realizes that something is not right in his room. His heart tells a tale of fear, which sends the narrator into a fit of rage and gives him the push he needs to carry out his plan.
Enze: To murder the old man and destroy the eye.
Gordon: Precisely. Next, we hear the beating of the heart is after the old man is dead. See, this is part of the reason the narrator tells us that he cut up the body before burying it under the floorboards.
Enze: Because now we know that there’s no way that is possible unless there was supernatural events involved.
Gordon: Exactly. Since we know that hearts of the dead are unable to beat on their own, the reader can see the narrator’s guilt and fear, thus giving us a “tale” of the narrator's negative
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
After the old man is dead and under the floorboards the police arrive, and the narrator remains calm and his "manor had convinced them.?Villains!" "Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- Here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!" The narrator of "The Tell Tale Heart" shows that he is unreliable. Concluding the questioning by the police, the narrator had a sudden fear and assumed that the policemen have heard the old man?s heart beat. Not only the narrator could hear the old man?s heart beating, but it is assumed (from the audience perspective) that the police could hear the narrator?s heart beating. The narrator listening to the old man?s heart beat is a replacement of his own consciousness that brought out the guiltiness for murdering the old man.
Edgar Allan Poe utilizes a wide range of methods to entice the reader into his piece, “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The storyline follows the events of a murder of an old man, in the perspective of the killer who claims he is mentally stable. The writer uses syntax, focusing on sentence length, and tone to emphasize that the narrator is not truly stable, thus not being a reliable perspective.
When he finally succeeded in murdering the old man he became glorified, thinking about how cleverly he accomplished his goal. However, the unsuspecting behaviour in front of the policeman, suggests that the narrator became ignorant of his behaviour and surrounding. This is because he cannot tell the difference between reality and his inner thoughts. He presumes that he has correctly and reasonably explained all the events of the story in a typical manner. Furthermore, he thinks the police officers and the neighbours hear the heart beating through the walls. Instead, it’s all in his mind because the heartbeat would only be heard when the narrator was in stress. This relinquishes us a clue that the heartbeat was a symbol of agony to him. The sound in the last few paragraphs of the short story is noticeable as an increase in sound. In the short story it states, (Poe, pg 106) “The ringing became more...it continued and became more distinct”. The increase of the beating is emphasized repeatedly. His repetition of the word “louder” echoes the sound of the heart beat. Finally, he shouts out his confession. (Poe, pg 106) “ I admit the deed!...here, here! --it is the beating of his hideous heart!” The main point is the narrator couldn’t distinguish whether this was reality or his inner thoughts. Only the narrator could hear the heartbeat, therefore this specific reasoning makes him
Like many of Poe's other works, the Tell-Tale Heart is a dark story. This particular one focuses on the events leading the death of an old man, and the events afterwards. That's the basics of it, but there are many deep meanings hidden in the three page short story. Poe uses techniques such as first person narrative, irony and style to pull off a believable sense of paranoia.
And when the storyteller couldn't take anymore of the Evil Eye looking at him, he said, "I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. " This is the start of the storyteller’s madness, and as the reader listens to what he says, the madness within the storyteller becomes very apparent. For eight nights in a row, the storyteller went to the old man’s chamber and cast a shred of light upon the Evil Eye that he so hated. For seven nights, it was always shut, and the storyteller could do nothing because it was only the eye that he hated, not the old man. On the eighth, the storyteller accidentally makes some noise and wakes the old man up.
In Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator is “tortured” in a piercing ringing as he accommodates a group of policemen sent to the old man’s house to investigate. While he is making small talk with the men, a sharp ringing appears, growing louder and louder as time passes. In hopes to rid himself of the noise, the narrator attempts to talk faster, changing the pitch of his voice as time progresses. This is described as follows, “I talked more quickly—more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased” (Tell-Tale Heart 4). However, these attempts were made futile as the ringing never ceased, ultimately prompting the narrator to admit his crime. The noise could be inferred as the manifestation of the guilt the narrator contains for killing the old man, of who was a kindred spirit and had watched over the former. It could also be said that the noise is the beating of his heart, of which the rate of the heartbeat would increase as he becomes more nervous and anxious. Correspondingly, the husband in The Black Cat has the same problem. In addition to the murder of Pluto, the husband attempted to kill to his second cat, of which did not result in the death of the actual cat, but the wife instead as she moved to protect the pet. In his rush to hide the evidence of his murder, the narrator accidentally walls up the living black cat with his wife. Once officers come to investigate the
It is impossible to say how the idea of murdering the old man first entered the mind of the narrator. There was no real motive as stated by the narrator: "Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me....For his gold I had no desire. I think that it was his eye!"
E. Arthur Robinson feels that by using this irony the narrator creates a feeling of hysteria, and the turmoil resulting from this hysteria is what places "The Tell-Tale Heart" in the list of the greatest horror stories of all time (94). Julian Symons suggests that the murder of the old man is motiveless, and unconnected with passion or profit (212). But in a deeper sense, the murder does have a purpose: to ensure that the narrator does not have to endure the haunting of the Evil Eye any longer. To a madman, this is as good of a reason as any; in the mind of a madman, reason does not always win out over emotion. Edward H. Davidson insists that emotion had a large part to play in the crime, suggesting that the narrator suffers and commits a crime because of an excess of emotion over intelligence (203).
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is one of the most successful fables ever written. It took off its most fantastic details regarding the murdered man 's vulture like eye, and the long drawn out detail concerning the murderer 's slow entrance into his victim 's room, the story stays at an unforgettable recording of the guilty conscience of the man 's voice.
At the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe’s fascination with death is apparent when the narrator ruthlessly killed an old man with a disturbing eye, but felt so guilty that he confessed to the police. The narrator dismembered the old man’s body and hid them in the floor, confident that they were concealed. However, when the police came to investigate, the narrator heard a heart beating and began to crack under the pressure. Overcome with guilt, he confessed that he murdered him and pulled up the floorboards. The narrator exclaimed, “But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” (“Heart” 4). Although the narrator was calm and confident at first, the guilt he experienced drove him mad, causing...
Through the first person narrator, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how man's imagination is capable of being so vivid that it profoundly affects people's lives. The manifestation of the narrator's imagination unconsciously plants seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an unmanageable situation for which there is no room for reason and which culminates in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lends itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death would monetarily benefit the narrator. Moreover, the narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator's obsession with the old man's eye culminates in his own undoing as he is engulfed with internal conflict and his own transformation from confidence to guilt.
The narrator tells us the reason he kills the old man is because of his “vulture eye” (Poe 1). Once the deed is done, he “smiled gaily” (Poe 2). The murder was solely because of the amount of adrenaline he had. Right before the narrator murders the man he claims that he can hear the heart beating of the old man. Obviously this is impossible and the readers know that. The heart he could hear was in fact his own. Because of his adrenaline, his heart's beats were growing faster and louder. Similarly at the end of the story, the narrator tells the police that he can hear “the beating of his hideous heart” (Poe 3). He believes that he can hear the dead man’s heart when it is actually his adrenaline rising again. He assumes the sound is coming from the man because he refuses to acknowledge his insanity. His conscience told him that the heart beating will be the reason he gets caught. The guilt and adrenaline played a huge role in the confession and perversity of the
The next character introduced is the narrator. He is both complex and interesting. He thinks he is not crazy. As he goes out of his way to prove that his is not insane, he does the exact opposite. His relationship with the old man is unknown. However, he does say he loves the old man. “I loved the old man.” (Poe 1).
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th ed. New York: Longman, 1999. 33-37.