Essays

Tell Tale Heart response

Authors note: I wrote this essay in response to a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, Tell Tale Heart. My goal for this essay was to work on my word choice.


You hear the floorboards outside your room creak. Someone’s weight is shifting back and forth. You cover your head with the blanket, trying to pretend it’s not there. The door slightly glides open, a single eye is peering into your room looking into your eyes, looking into your soul. Ever so slowly the figure lurks closer and closer to your bed.  

Being lonely is a pain that no one wants to endure and the main character in Tell Tale Heart is definitely lonely. He introduces himself in a strange way, trying to convince you that he is not crazy, that his disease has not dulled but sharpened his senses. He says nothing about any friends or any significant other. Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories play on our fears and like any other irony piece it shows us what we should fear.

In this short story the main character is obsessed with the landlord’s eye. He describes it as the eye of a vulture. He has stayed up night after night watching the old man sleep, using a lantern to shine a single beam of light on the one eye. Why is this man crazy? What has drawn him to insanity? According to the text, there is no evidence that the main character has a significant other ; meaning that there is no evidence saying that he has any friends, family or really anyone besides the old man. Why he is obsessed with the old man’s eye? The eye itself has no meaning but the fact that the old man is the only other person in the main characters life is why he obsessed with him.

A great example of this mindset the main character is the study of Dr. Harry Harlow. Dr. Harlow did a study with baby monkeys that he titled “The Well of Despair”. He took monkeys that had already bonded with their mothers, then placed them into a stainless steel cage. There were two makeshift monkeys, one made with wires and another with soft fabric and fuzzy limbs. The monkey made with wires was uncomfortable but provided a baby bottle of milk. The baby monkey clung to the soft almost “loving” mother, only going to the wire monkey when it needed food.

From this study I realised that my original thought on why the main character was obsessed with the old man was somewhat true. I believe this because the old man not only provided him a place to live but an un-knowing accompany to someone who had no one, making the old man both makeshift mothers in some way. The main character killed the old man because in his mind if someone took him away, his world would come crumbling down more than it already has. Just imagine if Dr. Harlow took both of the makeshift mothers from the baby monkey. The main character took matters into his own hands, and put the man in a place where he could never be taken from him.