Name: Filipe S.

Costa – PT3001717
Short Story: “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Author: Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–49
First published: 1843

Short Story – Bibliographical reference

Poe, Edgar Alan. The Tell-Tale Heart. 1983. Available in: The Tell-Tale Heart by E
dgar Allan Poe (virginia.edu)

Form

“Literature is language charged with meaning…Great literature is simply language

charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”. (Ezra Pound, ABC of Readi
ng)
“Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly
vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, gram
mar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everyth
ing that comes under the heading of ‘form’”. (EAGLETON, Terry. How to Read Lit
erature. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 2)
“If prose is to be as well written as poetry — the old modernists hope — novelists a
nd readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing th
e precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of his
torical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, rep
etitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judgi
ng how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with m
athematical finality”. (Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2008)
In literature, language matters; the way things are said is as worthy of attenti
on as what is told. Considering this fact and the extracts you have just read,
choose a sentence or a longer passage of your short story to discuss the us
e of language in the text. Quote the passage and then briefly explain how lan
guage is “charged with meaning” in it.
The words chosen in this story are very important for the readers to feel immersed
in the universe of the narrative and in the narrator's anguish.
We must remember that when it comes to dialogue, we usually have the Direct
Dialogue: characterized by the use of dash and quotation marks. The character
speaks directly; Indirect Dialogue: speech is narrated in the text; Free Dialogue: a
fusion between the third- and the first-person narrative, between author and
character; and the Monologue: the one that takes place inside the head, in the
psychic world. The character talks to herself, before addressing someone else.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the monologue predominates, although there are also
passages with indirect dialogue (“The old man, I explained, was absent, in the
countryside.”) and with direct dialogue (“– Miserables! – I shouted. - I confess the
crime!”)
In this story, there are many “sounds” and specific words that make the reader
almost hear what is happening in the environment in which the character is, such
as when the police arrive at the house where screams were heard, or when, from
according to the narrator, “there was a faint, rapid, muffled sound, similar to the
ticking of a watch wrapped in cotton” that wanted to report it to the police right
away.
The language in the story was fundamental because Poe manages to give shape
to the sounds that the tale emanates, sounds that often replace oral language, in
addition to showing the reader, through his monologues, how disturbing and
obscure are the character's reveries.

Plot

Plot, then, is part of narrative, but it does not exhaust it. We generally mean by it th
e significant action of a story. It signifies the way in which characters, events and si
tuations are interconnected. Plot is the logic or inner dynamic of the narrative. For
Aristotle’s Poetics, it represents ‘the combination of the incidents, or things done in
the story’. A summary of it is what we tend to come up with when someone asks us
what a story is about. (EAGLETON, Terry. How to Read Literature. New Haven/L
ondon: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 115)

To interpret a piece of prose fiction, it is important to have a good plot summ

ary so that you can observe what are the most significant elements of the nar
ration. Use this space to summarize the plot of your short story.

The story's plot is important for us to understand, through language, the

character's thoughts and the context in which the story takes place. The entire plot,
from the beginning of the story, is written in such a way as to generate discomfort
and discomfort for the reader.
In a perfect example of psychological horror, Edgar Allan Poe gives us a first-
person narrative of a madman who, like all of us, believes he is sane.
There is a disturbing coolness about proving your sanity by attesting to how the
murder was coldly calculated, not an act of impulse. Only for the end of the
narrative, the character is consumed by the paranoia of his vile act.
During the narrative we see a constant use of repetition. The author uses many
short sentences and there is no comma between them. Periods are often used,
this causes the tale to gain a tense pace as the narrator tells the story, until it
reaches the climax of the heart beating under the floor.
Edgar Alan Poe also uses alliteration a lot, which requires a good translation so
that certain keywords do not end up being lost throughout the story. When reading
the short story in English, the reader perceives a kind of cadenced rhythm and
repetitions of certain syllables at the beginning of sentences, which greatly
enriches the reading experience.
When talking about Portuguese language editions, my personal opinion is that the
translation by the publisher Martin Claret is very good. There is also the version by
the publisher Tordesilhas, which is very similar to the original story, as it has older
editions with more elaborate words, and the version by the publisher Darkside
Books, which is a little more modern, but fulfills its role very well.
 Interpretation

Authors may have long forgotten what they intended a poem or story to mean. In a
ny case, works of literature do not mean just one thing. They are capable of genera
ting whole repertoires of meaning, some of which alter as history itself changes, an
d not all of which may be consciously intended. (EAGLETON, Terry. How to Read
Literature. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 135)

As future literature critics and literature teachers, it is important to interpret t

he stories you read and to build coherent analyses of them. As an exercise, e
xplain briefly how you would interpret your short story, or even a passage of
it.

There are several significant symbols to interpret in The Telling Heart:

The eye
The eyes represent perception, awareness and truth. The narrator names the old
man's eye as the reason he should kill him, which suggests that he wants to be
seen and known. Poe's references to the eye as "evil" also suggest a common
belief in the supernatural ability to cast a curse with a malevolent glow.
There are other more specific resonances for the old man's eyes. The narrator
calls this a vulture's eye. As vultures are scavengers that eat dead things, this eye
signals how central death is in the story. It also symbolizes the authority of the old
man. (Critics who read the narrator as a woman interpret this authority as
specifically masculine. This idea of the "masculine gaze" is part of psychoanalytic
theory.) Finally, just as the crackling insects provide a distorted imitation of the old
man's heart, the narrator lantern echoes the old man's eyes. For the first seven
nights, he sneaks into the room, the flashlight is closed, as is the old man's eye.
On the eighth night, the old man opens his eye and the narrator opens his
flashlight - and the actions that follow "shed light" on the narrator's crazy and
murderous nature.

The heart
As the eye represents intelligence, the heart represents emotion. The inclusion of
both symbols in history creates a war between reason and emotion. The narrator
emphasizes his own meticulous and meticulous plot, focusing on his ingenuity in
executing and covering up his crime. However, it is passion that drives the narrator
to kill the old man (whose eye can be seen as a representation of intelligence) and
passion that drives him to confess. In both cases, this passion is symbolized by the
heart that beats incredibly loudly.

The House
By trying to hide the dead old man's body under the floor, the narrator symbolically
tries to hide the guilt of his crime in his subconscious. However, things repressed
or hidden in the subconscious always come back, leaking into normal
consciousness, like the dead but racing heart in this story. The police can be seen
as the voice of conscience and, although they never speak in the story, the
narrator's own guilt reveals itself.

Teaching literature

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes,
but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in wh
atever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way liter
ary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented. (Wood, James. H
ow Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs
us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice—to notice the way my mother,
say, often wipes her lips just before kissing me; the drilling sound of a London cab
when its diesel engine is flabbily idling; the way old leather jackets have white lines
in them like the striations of fat in pieces of meat; the way fresh snow "creaks" und
erfoot; the way a baby's arms are so fat that they seem tied with string (ah, the oth
ers are mine but that last example is from Tolstoy!). (Wood, James. How Fiction
Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

This tutoring is dialectical. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to prac
tice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which i
n turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach lit
erature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. (Wood, James. How
Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

Considering the extracts above, how would you read your short story in a lite
rature class to make your students “better noticers of life”?

In The Tell-Tale Heart the symbology is much more related to the psychological
aspects of the characters than to elements such as, for example, the
environmental aspects. In this sense, I believe it would be interesting to carry out a
reading that emphasizes the details of the narrator's (lack of) sanity.
We would carefully read the way the narrator begins his journey defending his
sanity and explaining why he acted so violently with an old man whom he claimed
to love. At all times he justifies his motivations, for him there is nothing that can
refute the fact that the problem was not the old man but his eye - an organ that he
attributes an evil essence.
Poe surprises with the story of someone who is visibly psychotic, but who not only
claims not to be crazy, but also philosophizes about it. His insanity seems to us so
certain that, even when we know that the tale will have a tragic outcome, we are
still surprised by the details and motivations behind all this madness.

Teaching English

Literary texts, being “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible
degree” (Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading), provide a fertile field for language les
sons to grow. Give an example of how you could use your short story (or a s
entence, or a part of it) to teach a language lesson.

To teach a language class, after reading and interpreting the story, I would
separate the classroom into 3 groups of students. The first group would see the
story from the Storyteller's point of view, the second group would see the facts
from the Old Man's point of view, and the third group from the policemen's point of
view. More or less like a small theater that emphasizes the details seen by each
character.
Students would be instructed to reread the story quickly and would be responsible
for highlighting to their peers, in English, which words, phrases and details of the
story express feelings according to the vision of each of the characters in Poe's
tale.