Post 2, Group C -- Poe's own Tell Tale Heart by Zach Helmstetter

     The story The Tell Tale Heart is about our narrator living under the roof of an older gentleman. They seemed to have a decent relationship until our narrator began to fear the old man's eye inexplicably. Due to said fear, he plans and plots the old man's death as that is the only logical solution he can draw. After many nights he finally kills the old man and hiding his body under the floorboards. Later police come and investigate sounds being heard on the night of the murder, to which our narrator submits to the search. Later after chatting with the cops he begins to hear the old mans heart beat under the floorboards, growing to a deafening roar before turning himself in to make it stop.

     Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart as well as many of his other more horrific and thrilling poems speak on the fear of madness and paranoia. Both The Black Cat, which we discussed in class, and Tell Tale Heart begin with the narrator explaining in great detail that he is not crazy. Much of the exposition throughout the Tell Tale Heart was to show how sane he is saying things like 'Ha! Would a madman have been so wise as this...' constantly attempting to convince the readers that he is a very sane man and what he is doing is justified. It feels as though he creates his narrator's greatest fears of misunderstanding in order to isolate them from the objective reality of their world compared to what they experience subjectively. I wonder too if his characters are a manifestation of his anxiety and fears of himself looking mad in real life, or even just sad and anxious as he was often described being in his life. After all, as he is quoted by Giammarco in a Neuroskeptic article measuring his psychilogical fortitude, he wrote to his family "I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but He drenched it in misery." (Neuroskeptic)

     Edgar lived in a time when mental illness was still looked down on as people being less than human or having some sort of spiritual irregularity or imbalance. The idea of being mentally ill in his time was more or less a social death. That and paranoia is its own way of experiencing fear, fear that the world around you in some way is attempting to harm you. Many examples of paranoia are seen throughout Tell Tale Heart such as the eye that starts it all, and isn't even explained as to why it's bad, it just is evil and he has to get rid of it to be safe once again. The sounds of the heart he thinks he hears and worrying that the police can hear it. Their fun and happiness existing only to laugh at his failures and insanity. 

     His understanding of fear does not come in the conventional form of a large, scary monster. No, it comes in the form of the monster he creates in his characters own minds, something that to an outsider would be absurd, but to them that fear clear as day and as real as anything you or I could see. Madness is it's own monster, and to some, the greatest one.


“The Psychology of Edgar Allan Poe.” Neuroskeptic, 19 Apr. 2016, blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/10/23/the-psychology-of-edgar-allan-poe/#.Wp3wsujwaMo.