Oh my god!
Those two eyes of that so-called mad man, piercing inside, from that door slit, in pitch dark, were more vulturous for me than those vulture eyes of the old man! Madness, retribution, self-guilt, anger, frustration, what was this? Was he really off his nuts? It was certainly not madness, I am sure! How faint was that ticking of watch enveloped in cotton?
How loud was that heartbeat?
But why did that heart not stop beating?
Was this mad man sentenced to the gibbet??
Did Mr. Poe write only such stuff?
This was my original reaction when I read this short story. So many questions! No answer! But the style and modus operandi of the author prevailed. The Tell-Tale Heart is one of the best-known stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It was published in 1843 in the Pioneer Magzine. A man has a distaste for an old man’s eyes and he has no other issue, and yet he murders him. Though he tells the reader at the beginning that you don’t call him mad. He is haunted by the eyes of an old man. He says they are the eyes of a vulture.
This was a tale of psychological gothic horror, Poe is a master in that. First, the tortured mind of the narrator commits the crime and manages his safe escape, with such precision. Then his guilty mind afflicts his burdened soul a thousand times more. He hears the heartbeat of the old man inside him and nobody hears that, no neighbors, no policemen. And that sound is so loud and so painful that he surrenders in the end.
“It was a low, dull, quick sound-much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath and yet the officers- heard it not.”
THE TELL TALE HEART
The execution of this horror and gothic tale is very much poetic, and the brilliance of the penmanship of the author was right away identified by a new reader. An amazingly written tale of horror and guilt- conscience.
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