Dissecting ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe

You fancy me mad

Did you feel the touch of madness when you read this? I sure did. It’s such a well-written masterpiece that deserves every accolade that’s thrown at it. Such descending guilt and spiraling madness! Tales that depict a fall to madness speak to all of us, and is one of the reasons this story resonates with us still.

And due to its length, it’s a very accessible tale for beginners to sink their metaphoric teeth into. Poe truly was a master of the form and I’m really savouring the little Poe spree I’m on at the moment. Do you have a favourite Poe tale?

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Spoilers abound from this point onwards…

A silent watch through the tale

I find it helpful to go slowly through the story and judge my reactions to it as a reader. This really helps me dive deeply into it. I take a wee pause after every paragraph and note down where I am as a reader. (Too much? Perhaps!)

The first sentence in the tale is a challenge. why will you say that I am mad?

We get the flavour of the tale right off the bat. Here is a man barely holding onto himself, being very nervous (those em dashes also give us a flavour of his mental state). This tone is held throughout the whole tale and gets more and more aggressive. He isn’t mad! Why would you say he’s mad!?

I heard many things in hell.

The next thing we get is an explanation of the fact that his hearing is very acute and that he can hear everything in heaven and on earth (and hell). What a strange statement. This man is clearly not right. He needs help. We also get a little drop in the word ‘disease’ which Poe mentions he has but never comes back to again.

So, here we are set up nicely as readers. He’s not right. Something’s way off. And he’s super sensitive in the sense department.

And we find that he can’t let go of the old man’s ‘vulture eye’. He’s hyper-fixated on something and will not let it go, so he decides to end this poor man’s life. Now, as readers, we ask if this old man really does have a weird looking eye, or if it is a creation of a sick mind (and we strongly lean on the latter as we go further in).

This is a man you wouldn’t want to meet in the street. Someone who can fixate on something he doesn’t like (imagined or otherwise) and does not know how to let it go. It must be dealt with. And how cunningly he goes about it.

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

Why paint a character like this? There’s really not much to relate to or admire (excepting the fact that we all feel a little mad sometimes). We wouldn’t want to know him. He thinks of himself in a grandiose fashion (rather like people have a tendency to do with certain mental illnesses), and he thinks nothing of offing this poor fellow. But yet, we are made to feel the tension and conflict growing within him that bursts out at the end.

So, our main character sticks his head in some lantern (it’s still not clear to me how this plays out physically in a room) and stalks the guy in his sleep for seven nights, but only catches the man sleeping.

And here we get our second priming of his overly-sensitive hearing. I cover it more below, but what we get is the sense that he can really hear this tiny sound that most people ought not to be able to hear. And so, when this sound reappears, we believe that the character can actually hear it. We don’t stumble over the story in our disbelief as the author has already worked us to believe in this part of the story.

It’s only when the old man is stirred by a noise he makes that the eye turns the main character to full-on madness and he is murdered, chopped up, and hidden under the floorboards.

Do you mark me well?

The character is rather chuffed with himself. It was all rather easy, too easy. The cops come round and he invites them in, even sits his chair atop the place directly above the dead body. He’s showing off to himself. They can’t touch him. For what had I to fear?

But the sound starts in at him. He hears much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. It sends him into a panic. It makes him act funny, wishing that the officers would just go away, but they are well at ease due to his welcoming nature beforehand.

Why would they not be gone?

And we get an almost breathless end to the tale, pock-marked by em dashes (scattered thoughts) and exclamation marks to show his frantic thoughts and actions before it is all too much for him. He confesses. It’s all too much for him to keep inside.

I felt that I must scream or die! — and now — again! — hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! —

What to take away from such a tale? It’s surely entertaining and you really feel the need to rush through the story as our main character loses it. It’s a reflection on guilt and how it can build up inside. It’s also a tale about mental illness. There’s a lot in here that speaks to the bipolar experience (mania, hyperfixation, violence, grandiose).

Do we root for this character? No, we don’t (at least, I don’t. I don’t want to meet him at all). Above all, it’s just a fantastically written tale that gets in your bones, a real descent into madness foray that still entertains so many years after it was first written (1843).

So, what are some of the technical elements in this tale that make it so darn effective?

‘ly’ – a good trick for building tension at the sentence level

There are certain creepy, tension-riddled scenes in this tale that are done really well. Take this particular sentence:

And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously — oh, so cautiously — cautiously (for the hinges creaked) — I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye.

What is it that writers who throw out novice-level writing advice always say about adverbs? That you should kill them. That adverbs are not your friend. Mary Oliver (that saint of poetic excellence) says: “Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.”

But, here, these three adverbs (the same word in fact) are doing the heavy lifting in this passage. Cautiously — oh, so cautiously — cautiously (for the hinges creaked). Why is this? It’s because the sequence is riddled with tension, and the mind clutches on to these emphasised adverbs which creates Poe’s (intended or otherwise) effect. There’s also something very musical about the selection of these ‘ly’ adverbs throughout these moments.

Another great example of being an expert and making your own rules.

The parenthetical interruptions (em dashes and brackets) also speak to our narrator’s heightened state of being. He’s hyperaware of everything and this choice in this sentence really brings that out in the reading experience.

‘I knew that sound well, too’

There are things in this story that just don’t make sense. How can he hear things that no one else can hear? How is he that super-sensitive?

If an author needs us as readers to swallow and believe something, then priming is the technique to use.

So, here was Poe’s problem. He needed to get us to believe that the character believed he could hear the minutest sound for when the end scene happens and he breaks due to his pacing guilt. Whether he thought of it in these terms is obviously unknown, but as writers, we can use this is somewhat of a formula.

If you need to get a reader to believe in something unbelievable, you must prime them for it.

Had Poe gone through the tale without telling us that the main character is sensitive and can hear such small sounds, the story would’ve died at the end. It’s by setting us up to believe that he can hear this small ticking from earlier in the tale that sets us up to suspend our disbelief when it really matters later in the story. (Whether the character can actually hear these sounds is by-the-by, he believes he can hear them so we believe he can).

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses? — now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

Not only are we told early on in the tale that his madness makes his senses more acute, Poe even drives home the point that this particular sound makes him furious. So, when we land at the end of the tale and he is hearing the same sound from the floorboards, we know it makes him furious too. A master stroke of writing.

Madness in punctuation

If you’re a writer, you may have been given the advice that exclamation marks are the sign of a bad writer. Elmore Leonard said, “You are allowed no more than two or three exclamation marks per 100,000 words of prose.”

So, the less exclamation marks the better. But, not if you’re dealing with a rather diseased mind. That’s what we have in Poe’s tale. All those fractured sentences split by em dashes really give you a sense of his broken, runaway thoughts. And all those exclamation marks serve well to paint a man who is in denial and everything he is thinking is 100% right! He is a man in control! Oh, you should see how in control he is!

If you do happen to read the tale again, notice how the use of em dashes and exclamation marks increase as the story ends and his guilt gets to fever pitch. It really adds a little extra energy to the story’s effect.

I also present a quote from Terry Pratchett’s Eric which hits the mark: “Multiple exclamation marks,” he went on, shaking his head, “are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”

Interesting reading

Poe wrote another story called The Black Cat shortly after The Tell-Tale Heart, which is very, very similar. He was clearly wrestling the topic of guilt and how it surfaces over this time and The Black Cat is also a fantastic read. Give it a go if you want some more. I’m not sure which of these two tales I prefer.

What were your thoughts? What makes this tale so well-thought of that it still appears in anthologies and ‘best of’ lists?