Tall-Tale_Heart

The Beating of His Hideous Heart “The Tall-Tale Heart,” one of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short stories, tells a tale of a mad man and his so called brilliant scheme to kill an old man because of his frightful, vulture like eye. While he goes in detail about the old man’s eye and how it drove him mad, the mad man’s undoing came with the thumbing noise of the old man’s heart after his death. Ironic, is it not' The old man’s heart, the one thing that didn’t bother the mad man, haunted him to confess his actions when, in fact, the old man’s eye drove the mad man to kill. This, perhaps, suggests that the mad man’s insanity grew in him before he actually committed the murder. How can this be and why is it ironic' Read on and the irony might drive you mad as well. Before we can get to the irony, one must know about “The Tall-Tale Heart.” The story begins with the mad man describing the old man and how he took care of him. The mad man, who actually loved the old man, hated his pale blue, cloudy eye that he described vulture like. To rid of the eye that makes the mad man’s blood run cold, the mad man decides to kill him. He begins to tell how he crept in the old man’s room quietly a week before he committed the awful deed. On the night of the murder, again the mad man crept in the room quietly and slowly. The old man awoke because of a sound. Slowly and silently, the mad man shined a beam of light on the old man’s cold, cloudy, pale blue eye. Can’t taking it any longer, the mad man rushed in and placed the bed on top of the old man fast enough that the old man could only give off one, shrill, shriek into the night. With the bed over the old man, slowly suffocating him, the only audible sound was the slow, labored beating of the heart. With the deed done and the heart finally seized beating, the mad man dismembered the old man and placed his remains under the floorboards. The next morning and the mad man full of cheer, three police officers knocked on the door for a neighbor woke when that shrieked filled the night. The mad man, giving no care and thinking his deed was wise enough that he couldn’t be caught, let the officers in and search the home. In the very room where the old man’s remains, they chatted and lingered in that room. The mad man started to hear a noise after some time that became louder and louder. When the mad man couldn’t take the noise of the old man’s beating heart, he confessed to the officers his horrible deed. Didn’t quite see the irony yet' It’s as obvious as the beating heart to the mad man. In the beginning, Edgar describes the old man’s eye in great detail only because it made the mad man go cold and dark when it fell upon him. As the story continues, we catch first glimpse of the heart when the mad man puts the mattress over the old man. All we hear, however, is the hearts slow, labored, last beats yet the mad man takes no notice nor does it drive him insane, yet. The madness grew only when the officers came and searched his home for the source of the shriek. Even with the eye gone, the mad man couldn’t forget his deed and the madness grew in him with the thought of the heart beating from the floor. Also, when we first hear about the heart, the bed covered the old man suggesting that the mad man had, indeed, started to go mad before he placed the old man in the floor. That little detail might have foreshadowed the madness in the man before his confession and the beating through the floorboards. The irony of the heart verses the eye clearly resembles that while the mad man claimed sanity during the murder, insanity occurred perhaps long before than the mad man realized. The heart and the eye might not be the clearest of ironies to the reader yet, I found it to be quite interesting that Edgar included both the eye and heart of the old man. If the heart drove the mad man insane only, I would suspect Edgar to include it with far more detail, yet he did not and for good reason. The eye and the heart play important roles in one of his greatest and iconic pieces and if either were cut out, the story wouldn’t have such an epic impact of the beating heart in the mind of the killer.