"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

A genius of macabre operatic plots and suspenseful pacing, Edgar Allan Poe earned the title of father of modern horror literature. In the power of describing imaginary, and even miraculous scenes, actions and events, Poe possesses a kind of similarity to Swift, and also to some of the writers in the Arabian Nights, and among the Hebrews, ancient Persians, and other Oriental fabulists; but while Poe's narratives excite an equally rivetting interest and apprehension, they are not, for the most part, beautiful or poetical though we must admit several marked exceptions of somewhat depressing loveliness and melancholy fascination. As his literary skills developed, Poe applied them almost exclusively to writing gothic poems and stories. At the height of his melancholy, Poe coordinated the disparate elements of his genius—beauty, loss, death, and horror, all set in European or exotic settings (Robinson, 1965).

Poe was a master of the technical elements of verse, includingcaesura, inversion, repetition, and rhetorical question; equally, in prose, he had consummate skill in manipulating the drama of character duality, suspense, morbidity, intimidating atmosphere, unresolved conflict, and escalating psychotic obsession, the motivation in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat," both written in 1843. With regard to the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, they have been in certain instances mistaken by admirers in many parts of the world,—not for any rare qualities they really possess, but for something they have not.

One of Edgar Allan Poe's classic horror tales, "The Tell-Tale Heart" has been called a model of gothic fiction. First printed in the January 1843 issue of the Boston Pioneer, it preceded "The Black Cat" (1843), another psychological study of madness, stalking, and murder. The author, battling depression over the failing health of his wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, organized the narrative of "The Tell-Tale Heart" around the protagonist's obsession over the evil eye. The visual detail is so engrossing that it inflames the stalker to throttle an aged man and inter his corpse at the scene of the crime under planked flooring (Tucker, 1981).

Poe approached the story as the monologue of an unidentified egocentric killer, whom critics have mused, might be female. Cast as a psychotic and sadomasochist, the narrator tries to establish sanity by detailing the crime, step by step. The perpetrator admits his lethal sacrifice of a harmless old man and softens the act by smothering him. ...