What tortured him in the material world seems to have fed his imagination he turned his confrontations with life’s limits (including the horror of death) into a canon of literature that toed the line between madness and method. He poured his struggles onto the page - sometimes consciously, sometimes less so - and the result is a body of work that is still among the best known in American letters. Poe would know: his life story could be told in much the same way, a pendulum that swung erratically from ambition to addiction over his short 40 years. The heart, in other words, tells a tale of the mind - and what happens when it is pushed to the limit.Įmbodied cognition, as dramatized in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is a way of accounting for such limits and the terror we feel when confronting them. Poe not only makes us feel the tortured dissembling he describes, but he also seems to insist that thinking is feeling: minds are always battling to keep the passions in check lest they burst forth in catastrophic ways. But guilt is something physical, too: ringing in his ears, beating through his feet. The murder plot, which seems to come from somewhere else (“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain”), sharpens the narrator’s senses and steadies his hand.
But beneath the crime and cover-up is an account of thinking in general, of how mind and matter flow into one another in ways we can’t control. The thumping of the titular organ has become a shorthand for criminal conscience, for what happens when we can’t let certain things slide. Mistaking the hammer of his own heart for that of the dead man, he breaks down the wall between his inner monologue and the outside world: “ear up the planks! here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!”īut what tale does the heart tell? On the surface, Poe’s story is about the unbearable nature of guilt, his narrator a precursor to Raskolnikov cowering in his flat or Stephen Dedalus sweating in church. Poe’s style, all em dashes and italics, is the dark mirror of the agony it portrays: pulled apart by anxiety, the narrator’s mind ultimately comes undone in the story’s final line.
While the crime takes up most of the story, the drama lies elsewhere: in the mind of the narrator, as he strains to make sense of the senseless thing he’s done. First published in 1843, the story recounts a heinous act - murdering a housemate and stuffing his body beneath the floorboards - and the narrator’s attempt to rationalize it after the fact. “TRUE! - NERVOUS - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am but why will you say that I am mad?” So begins what may be the most famous short story of all time: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe.
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