First, a brief summary of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

An unnamed narrator confesses that he has

murdered an old man, apparently because of the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ which drove the narrator to
kill him. He then describes how he crept into the old man’s bedroom while he slept and stabbed
him, dragging the corpse away and dismembering it, so as to conceal his crime. He goes to some
lengths to cover up all trace of the murder – he even caught his victim’s blood in a tub, so that
none was spilt anywhere – and then he takes up three of the floorboards of the chamber, and
conceals his victim’s body underneath. But no sooner has he concealed the body than there’s a
knock at the door: it’s the police, having been called out by a neighbour who heard a shriek during
the night. The narrator lets the police officers in to search the premises, and tells them a lie
about the old man being away in the country. He keeps his calm while showing them around, until
they go and sit down in the room below which the victim’s body is concealed. The narrator and
the police officers talk, but gradually the narrator begins to hear a ringing in his ears, a noise that
becomes louder and more insistent. He believes that it is the beating of the dead man’s heart,
taunting him from beyond the grave. Eventually, he can’t stand it any more, and tells the police
to tear up the floorboards, the sound of the old man’s beating heart driving him to confess his
crime.

The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is clearly unstable, as the end of the story reveals, but his
mental state is questionable right from the start, as the jerky syntax of his narrative suggests:

True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am
mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the
sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in
hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the
whole story.

The multiple dashes, the unusual syntactical arrangement, the exclamation and question marks:
all suggest someone who is, at the very least, excitable. His repeated protestations that he is sane
and merely subject to ‘over acuteness of the senses’ don’t fully convince: there is too much in his
manner (to say nothing of his baseless murder of the old man) to suggest otherwise.

And indeed, what makes ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ especially chilling – and here we might draw a
parallel with another of Poe’s best-known tales, ‘The Black Cat’ – is that the killer freely
confesses that his murder of the old man was a motiveless crime:
I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had
no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye,
with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very
gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye
forever.
But what makes Poe’s tale especially effective is the way he employs doubling to suggest that it is
perfectly natural that the narrator should be paranoid about the sound coming from the
floorboards. For before he had murdered the old man, the narrator had imagined his victim ‘trying
to comfort himself’ when he heard a noise outside his bedroom:

I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the
bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them
causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself – ‘It is nothing but the wind in the
chimney – it is only a mouse crossing the floor,’ or ‘It is merely a cricket which has made a single
chirp.’ 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.

But of course this is really the narrator projecting his own unease around sounds; and it thus
foreshadows his later paranoia over the supposed sound coming from under the floorboards – the
sound that will drive him to confess to his crime.

But along with the ‘motiveless’ nature of the narrator’s crime, the other aspect of ‘The Tell-Tale
Heart’ which makes it such a powerful analysis of the nature of crime and guilt is the slight
ambiguity hovering over that sound which taunts the narrator at the end of the story. It seems
most likely that the sound exists only in his head, since the policemen are apparently oblivious to
it as they continue to chat away calmly to the narrator. (This is the one real weak point in Poe’s
story: once they’ve searched the premises they appear to hang around to make small talk with the
narrator. Haven’t they got more important things to do? Unless the narrator isn’t as calm at this
point as he believes, and they suspect foul play and are trying to get him to reveal something
incriminating…) But we cannot be entirely sure. Even if the sound is supernatural in origin – and
Poe was obviously a master of the supernatural, as several of his other best stories attest – it may
be that his victim is making his ghostly heartbeat heard only to the narrator, burrowing away deep
within his mind. But on balance we’re tempted to think that Poe, along with Dickens around the
same time (compare the studied analysis of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit’s mind as he flees the
scene), is pioneering a new kind of approach to the ‘ghost story’ here – one in which the ‘ghost’ is
no more than a hallucination or phantom of the character’s mind. Although such ambiguity had
been used to good effect by Shakespeare, in the ghost story it is Poe, in such stories as ‘The Tell-
Tale Heart’, who used this ambiguous plot detail to offer a deeper, more unsettling analysis of the
nature of conscience.