Troy University

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My Nguyen
ENG 1102
Troy Online
Instructor Name: G.Sewell
Date: 7/16/2020
Assignment Name: Fiction Essay

Mental disorder has been an issue among people these days.

People talk about it in real life, on internet and it raised
awareness among them. People might not realize that mental
disorder has been portrayed in literature from long time ago.
There is Macbeth by William Shakespeare tells about the desire
for prophecy and power lead to hallucination, and the one
people might be familiar with is The Shining by Stephen King,
which tells about the man who develops schizophrenia and OCD
which lead to psychopathic behavior. Another example is The
Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar A. Poe, which will be discussed in
this essay.
All these work come from real life and it is important for
us to see the depiction of real life from different kind of
perspectives, to expand our imagination in seeing things. When
reading a literature work, we try to go inside the author’s
mind by looking at his story, the characters also the things
that happen in the real life that inspired the author to write
the story.
The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story written by Edgar Allan
Poe in 1843. It is a four-page suspense horror short story.
The short story is written in the first person point of view.
It tells about an unnamed man (the narrator) who commits a
murder while convincing the reader about his sanity.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator was trying to
convince the reader that he was sane. He was not out of his
mind. He felt powerful and in control of his own action. The
narrator lived with an old man. This man had a vulture’s eye.
He saw that as an evil eye, so he did not like it. It became a
reason or a trigger for the narrator to kill him.
He sneaked out in the middle of the night. He entered the
old man’s room so deliberately that he didn’t wake the old
man. He heard the man’s heart beating out loud. He was
nervous. The sound was getting louder in his head. He opened
his lantern entered the old man’s room. He pulled the bed over
the old man, so that he couldn’t breathe. The old man died in
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his hands. The narrator felt so relieved that the sound of the
old man’s heart did not bother him anymore. The narrator
chopped off the old man’s body into parts. He hid the body
parts under the floor.
At four o’clock in the morning, three police officers came
in to the house. The narrator explained that the old man had
been out of the country. He took the officers a tour around
the house just to make the officers sure that nothing had
happened. The police officers were having chat, yet as they
were talking the narrator heard noises. It became louder. The
narrator was trying so hard to get rid of them, but he
couldn’t. He screamed asking for help, but the officers were
still talking to each other, laughing. He couldn’t stand about
the noises. He uncovered the floorboards, showed the officers
the old man’s body and committed his crime. That moment he
realized that the noises came from the old man’s beating
heart.
This short story tells us about a man who has
schizophrenia. He has schizophrenia symptoms, such as feeling
an extreme nervous “True! –nervous –very, very dreadfully
nervous I had been and am”, intense anxiety (paranoia) “And
now a new anxiety seized me –the sound would be heard by a
neighbor!” and having a series of hallucination “It grew
louder --louder --louder! And still the men chatted
pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not?
Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they
knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!“. He thought
that his senses are heightened. “The disease had sharpened my
senses –not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense
of hearing acute. I heard all things in heaven and in the
earth. I heard many things in hell” He does not realize that
those voices are not real. Those are only in his mind.
Everything was normal for him. He claims himself that he is
perfectly sane, that he’s not crazy. He feels calm and
cunning. However he couldn’t separate what is real and what
isn’t. What exactly that made him like this?
For further analysis, semiotics will be used as the method
from now on. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and
their use or interpretation. The story will be seen or
interpreted by seeing from the symbolism and the signs.
The narrator said that “I loved the old man. He had never
wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had
no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had
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the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it.
Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees
--very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the
old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” The old man
is probably the narrator’s master. He is very rich but he is
kind. As a master, he treats the narrator well and kindly.
However, the old man’s eye, the vulture eye has a significant
role in this story. It terrifies the narrator. How? and why
vulture? According to Oxford Dictionary “vulture” is a large
bird of prey with the head and neck more or less bare of
feathers, feeding chiefly on carrion and reputed to gather
with others in anticipation of the death of a sick or injured
animal or person. The narrator is afraid that the vulture eye
somehow sees or foresees something (a film over it). This film
may be his terror, his death. The vulture eye anticipates the
death of the narrator. The death here also could mean
betrayal. Perhaps, the narrator is afraid that someday, his
master would betray him or kill him after the nice treatment
he has been received. This also fits with the symptom of
schizophrenia, which is paranoia.
The next symbolism is the beating heart. Generally, heart
symbolizes the center of a person. The heart in this story
symbolizes the guilty of the narrator. The narrator hears the
heart twice, before killing the old man and when the police
are investigating the crime. The narrator said “Villains!" I
shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the
planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
he thought that the sound of the beating heart was the old
man’s. How about that actually was beating was his own heart,
his consciousness? Deep down the narrator knows that what he’s
about to do/ what he has done is wrong. His heart tries to
wake him up, twice.
The third are watches. Edgar A. Poe often mentions clocks
and watches in his short stories, such as in The Pit and the
Pendulum. Clocks, watches, and time symbolize the approach of
death. The narrator, who controls the time of death for the
old man, compares himself to a watch's minute hand. The
narrator said “…but he had found all in vain. All in vain;
because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black
shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.”

Despite everything that happens to the narrator, Edgar Allan

Poe has shown what is really going on in a person with
schizophrenia. The inability to differentiate what is real and
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what is not becomes a problem. It is not fair blaming a

schizophrenic person for what happen, especially since they
believe that they are normal and sane. Seeing with the
different perspective is really important in this case.
However, special treatment is needed for a person who develops
schizophrenia symptoms. They have better be going to the
psychiatrist and have their medication. One last thing that
Poe wants to tell is that a person’s heart never lies. It
always reveals the truth. It has the loudest sound compared to
any other sound in the world.