The Tell Tale Heart - A Story of Memorable Fiction
Edgar Allan Poe was a great writer who was born in the early eighteen hundreds. He was considered one of the very first short story writers of his time.
The Tell Tale Heart was a short story that brought him world acclaim. It was first published in 1843 when Poe was thirty four years old. This thought provoking short story was first put into print in Boston, Massachusetts in a journal called The Pioneer. Tell Tale Heart was considered Gothic fiction during this Romantic Movement time period.
A Tell Tale Heart is a story of a murder most heinous and a narrator who fights his insanity. The Tell Tale Heart is a short story about a narrator who can not stand the pale blue eye of the old man that lives with the narrator. In this story, the narrator, has such acute senses that this eye seems to be driving the narrator crazy.
This story states that the narrator has nothing against the old man, the narrator even loves him, but it is the old man's eye that the narrator hates. Murder is soon committed by the narrator. Insanely, the narrator cuts up the body of the old man and puts it under the old man's floor boards in the room in which he slept.
As the story goes, it is the old man's heart that keeps on beating under the floor and this beating causes the narrator to confess to the crime. There has been much debate over the narrator in the Tell Tale Heart. Many believe that the narrator in this short story is a man while others believe it is a women. It leaves the reader guessing as to the gender of the narrator.
The narrator's identity is not revealed throughout the story. There is another person in this story whose identity is kept secret. Whoever the narrator is telling the story to is also not revealed. Edgar Allan Poe has a way of keeping everyone wondering who is who in this story. He only reveals the bare minimum of facts about his cast of characters. Names of the murderer and the murdered are not mentioned as well as where they lived or what was their relationship to each other.
Film and radio both have used the story of The Tell Tale Heart for entertainment. They have taken bits and pieces from Edgar Allan Poe's short story to use in movies and on the radio. This story has inspired such films as "Sleep No More" and the public radio version of "The Tell-Tale Heart". Vincent Price, who was a well known actor, recited this short story with four other Edgar Allan Poe stories in a film made for television. Tell Tale Heart left a legacy of fine literature.