![]() ![]() It is possible that this is the cold-blooded work of a psychopath convinced of his own rightness. ![]() It is possible that the entire episode is a figment of the (unreliable) narrator’s imagination. The story is cleverly constructed so that logic permits many interpretations. ![]() When the police come to visit, there is no visible trace of wrongdoing, but the sound of the dead man’s beating heart rings on in our narrator’s ears until his guilt overpowers him and he gives himself up. This pushes our narrator over the edge, and he first smothers, then butchers, then buries him under the floor boards. These obsessive compulsive inspections finally disturb the old man, who then sits awake in his bed in mortal fear, his heart pounding audibly. He has spent a week inspecting it by lantern light in the dead of night as his elderly victim lies sleeping. The Tell-Tale Heart is the breathless short story of a man who, if he is to be believed, has been driven to murder because the sight of someone’s white-veiled, vulture-like, always-open eye has become unbearable to him. So once more I need to shut out the August sunshine, pretend it’s the middle of the night, and enter the macabre and fragile world of the human mind. Today Edgar Allen Poe walks us along the tight rope between sanity and insanity in his psychological thriller, The Tell-Tale Heart. ![]()
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