Tell-Tale Heart

Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe

Fiction
          In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, the insane narrator blames a milky blind eye for driving him to murder. The narrator is the caretaker of an old man to whom the eye belongs. Night after night, the narrator watches the old man while he sleeps, waiting to kill the old man. One night, the old man stirs, the eye opens, and the narrator lashes out and kills him. After this, the narrator begins to hallucinate the beating of the dead man’s heart, which causes him to scream and rage.

Poe uses a lot of symbolism in the story. One symbol is the eye. The narrator refers to the eye as a “damned spot”. The phrase “damned spot” comes from the play Macbeth by Shakespeare. The phrase occurs when Lady Macbeth is overcome with guilt because of the part she played in King Duncan’s murder and she begins to imagine blood on her hands.  The narrator, too, feels guilty about his desire to murder the old man and the eye symbolizes his guilty conscience. The heart also represents the narrator’s conscience.  It beats to remind the narrator of what he did. The narrator’s conscience -- the heart and the eye -- remind the narrator of his responsibility to the old man. And it can be noted that the more the narrator tries to escape his responsibility to the old man by ignoring his conscience, the more obstinate it becomes. If the narrator had not denied his responsibility to the old man, the narrator wouldn’t have killed him, therefor avoiding his capture by the police and the consequences that would surely follow. Tell-Tale Heart is Poe’s way of saying that one should be responsible for one’s duties.