Tower and Town, November 2023

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Thoughts Invoked By Literature

Year 13 student, Sadie Watts suggests you should read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe and take a journey that will have you questioning your morality.

“True! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous.” Are the opening lines of Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart. From the beginning, the story immerses you in chaos; there is no escape. The narrator’s descent into madness forces the reader to spiral with them. The lack of responsibility and ownership the narrator holds leaves the reader in a difficult place. Although you know you shouldn’t sympathise or attempt to understand, you do. You do understand why the narrator blames the old man’s eye for his insanity. You do understand that despite the narrator loving the old man he has to kill him. You are made to feel as though you are there, holding the lantern into the old man’s room each night.

When I first read this story, I was 14. Over the years and the more times I’ve read it, it’s felt like a new story each time I picked it up. Even though I knew the ending, it never ceased to amaze me. It left me feeling emotions no other story has left me feeling. The detailed description of everything the narrator was going through left you feeling exhausted and relived by the time “the work” had been done. I didn’t think it was possible to feel that way about an unjustified murder.

Poe had twisted the protagonist’s sense of guilt into something negative. Feeling guilty for a crime you have committed is seen as a good thing. It shows that you are a person like everybody else. Not feeling remorse is foreign to many people and a clear sign that you are a terrible person, there is no hope for you. But in this short story it is depicted as the opposite. The narrator is so close to getting away with this crime they even sit with the police officers in the very room it happened in, with them never suspecting a thing. It is their guilt - the heart beating under the floorboards - that ruins their chance of freedom.

For the few pages you are engaged with this story, Poe twists the way you feel about things. He doesn’t allow for you to have thoughts about what you’ll be having for dinner later, or that you’re really looking forward to seeing your friends at the weekend. All you can consider and ask is, why? Why did the protagonist start to feel this way? Why was he looking after this old man in the first place? I think that’s one of the reasons I love it so much. The erratic inner monologue of the protagonist and the cathartic experience of the murder is a journey I think everybody should take.

Sadie Watts (y13)