story of a fiend so stricken with the knowledge of being a hair or heart-beat away from being caught.
I wrote an essay for a college horror writing class some years ago. It would seem my fear has become reality:
This is an essay on the horror elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I will attempt to provide distinct answers to the questions posed in it.
The “Tell-Tale Heart,” or TTH as it will be referred to in the rest of this essay, conforms to the Horror genre because, as the Encyclopedia Britannica Online indicates, it was intended by the author to invoke a “strong sense of fear” in the reader. TTH also includes a “monster,” a monster that in this case only occurs in the mind.
The monster is the “heart-beat” that is perceived by the narrator throughout the story. It was the heartbeat that in the end “attacked” him mentally and caused his downward spiral. In the following passage, “It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage,” the “monster heart” is introduced. It grows exponentially as the plot thickens and so ends the story with the narrator succumbing to it in the end.
Poe has created an atmosphere of fear in TTH using various props ranging from the narrators startlingly twisted mindset to the descriptions of taking an hour for his head alone to gain entry to a room. That sent shivers down my spine. Other important contributions to atmosphere in the story come near the conclusion where the following description provides a classic example, as described by Lovecraft, of how atmosphere contributes to fear in the reader; “I gasped for breath –and the officers heard it not.” Also at the end of the story the following sentence provides the reader with ample uneasiness, “I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased.” This is truly startling behavior which continues the paranoid atmosphere.
In conclusion, TTH remains as a short yet powerful expression of insanity taking action against its environment. One could only hope to never know a person as disturbed as the narrator in TTH. Just read about them.
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