A literary analysis on "The Tell Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

Literary Analysis of “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

Sungwon Kim

             The short story, “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe contains horror, a key element of American gothic literature. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, gothic fiction is “a mode of narrative fiction dealing with supernatural or horrifying events and generally possessed of a claustrophobic air of oppression or evil. (Birch, Dinah. "Gothic fiction.”) The horror aroused from the narrator’s story of killing makes it a classic work of gothic fiction. The narrator reveals his evilness as he describes his psychological process in the murder. The background of night and darkness, description of sight and sound, and fear felt by the victim himself adds intensity to the feeling of horror to readers.

The story is about a brutal murder. The narrator describes how he killed an old man. He went to the old man’s room in a sneaky manner every night. While the old man was sleeping, he just watched him lying down on a bed. He does this for seven nights, and he feels excited. This scene of mental insanity arouses fear in minds of readers. However, the narrator say that he is not mad and that he did not kill the old man out of feelings of hatred, revenge or greed. On the contrary, he tells the reader that he felt love toward the man, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.” What drove him to commit murder was the old man’s eye which caused him to feel anxious and even furious. He calls it, “the eye of a vulture.” Killing an old man because his eyes is a sign of psychological madness. As the reader is told the narrator’s thought in detail, the mad man’s psychopathic personality disorder contributes to a feeling of horror. For instance, when he kills the man, the narrator says, “I then smiled gaily.” He is also proud when he hides the body under the floor. The biggest shock to readers that creates the most intense horror is what he does to the body of the old man after the murder. The narrator says, “I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.” He then hides pieces of the body under the floor. In addition to the horror felt by the madness of the narrator, this brutal act clearly marks this story as gothic.

             Poe’s emphasis on the setting of the story also creates a mood of suspense and horror. The whole atmosphere during the story is darkness, and this darkness attributes to making readers to be unaware of what will happen next. It induces the readers to feel nervous and tense. For example, at night when the murderer watches upon the old man while asleep, there is suspense because it is uncertain what the insane man will do. He creeps at night holding a dark lantern. In addition, Poe uses little sounds in silence and dark that add suspense, such as “wind in the chimney,” “the mouse crossing the floor,” “the hinges creaked.” The mad man also hears the beating of the old man’s heart which is caused by the victim’s own fear and the narrator’s madness. He hears heartbeat even when the old man is dead.

             Readers are directly told about the horror felt by the old man before he is killed. Ever since the old man hears a slight noise caused by tin fastening, he stays awake. The mad man describes, “His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not.” He also writes, “Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.” Therefore, it is easy to imagine how scared the old man was.

            “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic fiction of horror and suspense. The narrator is a psychopath, and the process of the violent murder and the fear of the victim directly create horror in the reader. Other indirect elements such as the darkness of the night and the suspenseful sounds in the writing make the horror more intense. 

Work Cited

Birch, Dinah. "Gothic fiction." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 9 Mar. 2013