Poe’s Dark Mind

Guilt is a powerful beast that haunts humankind. It serves as a panic button to the conscience. The question of the human conscience plays out strongly in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Tale-Tell Heart.” There are three questions to ask for this story. Is the narrator going mad, or is it his conscience making him nervous? How does Poe show himself in the narrator? How is the human conscience the “safety alarm” in human life?

The first question to ask is is the narrator going mad, or is it his conscience making him nervous? This is a difficult question to answer. Some blame the narrator’s actions on his mental illness, and others say he knows what he is doing. Poe gives the reader on clue for the readers to debate on the narrator’s sanity. He asks, “TRUE! – NERVOUS- VERY, VERY DREADFULLY NERVOUS I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe. 81) That may seem fair, but then the narrator goes on to state, “The disease had sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things on hell.” (Poe. 81) Now, the narrator sounds creepy. This leads readers to believe he has mental problems. The whole story reveals to the reader different murder cases that question the suspect’s sanity. Did the murder do this because they are ill, or did they do the crime on their own? To answer that question, one has to look at an important factor. Did they know what they were doing when they committed the crime? The narrator in Poe’s story describes every detail of his employer’s murder. It sounds as if the narrator was sane enough to harm his employer. But what was the motive in this murder? The narrator did not hate the old man or want his money. The old man was actually kind to his caretaker. The narrator killed the old man because of his right eye. That is a bizarre reason to kill someone. But then again, so is the narrator, as he appears to be. The real debate over his sanity comes when the police arrive to investigate and stay. The narrator is so nervous that he begins to hear the old man’s heart beating. The old man is dead and buried. The sound is so intense that the narrator gives up and says, “I felt that I must scream or die!” (Poe. 86) This leads to ask, was the narrator really crazy or did his conscience finally caught and ate him alive? One can probably say that it did. But judging by the description of hearing the old man’s heart, the safest conclusion is that the narrator was thrown into madness.

The next question to ask is how does Poe show himself in the narrator? Poe did not have a cheerful life. His mother died when he was a small boy. Even though his best friend’s mother took him in, her husband looked down upon Poe because his mother was an actress. In those days, actresses were looked down upon in society. Then his best friend’s mother died, and Poe was sent away to a boarding school. A little ray of sunshine came when Poe married his young cousin. But she sadly died young as well. It is said that art imitates life. If that is the case, Poe’s work is dark and depressing because of all of the death he had witnessed. Poe shows himself perfectly in the narrator. Poe writes this story so properly, that one would assume that the narrator’s thoughts are of his creator’s depressed mind. They are both dark and borderline-insane. The quote that sounds like Poe is this one, “Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing.” (Poe. 81) But in a sense, Poe shows the reader what could have been his future in his stories. Perhaps, Poe would have been driven to murder if he had not chosen to write all of his poems and short stories.

The final question to ask is how is the human conscience is the “safety alarm” in human life? To look at a bigger picture, without order, the world would be trapped in anarchy. Poe shows the reader what could happen when the conscience is ignored for a long period of time. Guilt in human nature can and will eat at one’s soul over time. The results are not pleasant. The way the narrator’s conscience drives him to madness is by driving his brain to hear the dead old man’s heart beat getting louder and louder. The police do not notice that the narrator is silently losing his mind at first. In fact, they only want to see if the narrator and his employer are in good will. The fact that they stay in the house and talk pleasantly for hours at a time make the narrator’s conscience grow worse. In the beginning, the narrator is a confident and heartless insane killer. He even denies beginning insane by declaring, “How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily- how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” (Poe. 81) But in the end, he proves to the reader that he is indeed still a human being with an all too powerful conscience that proves to be stronger than his madness. He stands up and yells out to the police, “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed— tear up the planks! – here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!’” (Poe. 86)

Poe takes away any question of sanity from the reader about the narrator. He shows the reader that the narrator knows what he is doing by having him describe every detail of his devious plan of murder and the end result of his acts. The narrator was calm with his devious thoughts and actions in the beginning. But the reader sees him slowly cripple into unspeakable levels of guilt and madness. The answer is clear in the end; the narrator is a victim of his own madness. He is as a strong example of what happens when the guilty ignore their conscience for too long. Without the human conscience, mankind would be heartless beasts driven by cold instinct.

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Tell-Tale Heart” A Pocketful of Prose: Vintage Short Fiction Volume Two.

Thomson Wadsworth