(This is the one real weak point in Poe’s story: once they’ve searched the premises they appear to hang around to make small talk with the narrator. It seems most likely that the sound exists only in his head, since the policemen are apparently oblivious to it as they continue to chat away calmly to the narrator. All in vain because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.īut of course this is really the narrator projecting his own unease around sounds and it thus foreshadows his later paranoia over the supposed sound coming from under the floorboards – the sound that will drive him to confess to his crime.īut along with the ‘motiveless’ nature of the narrator’s crime, the other aspect of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ which makes it such a powerful analysis of the nature of crime and guilt is the slight ambiguity hovering over that sound which taunts the narrator at the end of the story. He had been saying to himself – ‘It is nothing but the wind in the chimney – it is only a mouse crossing the floor,’ or ‘It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.’ Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. For before he had murdered the old man, the narrator had imagined his victim ‘trying to comfort himself’ when he heard a noise outside his bedroom: Both texts centre on the murder of an ‘old man’ in both cases, the murderer is driven to feel guilt over his crime by being ‘haunted’ by his victim from beyond the grave (Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, the old man’s beating heart in Poe’s story) both Macbeth and Poe’s narrator show signs of being at least a little mentally unstable in both texts, the murder of the victim is followed by a knocking at the door.īut what makes Poe’s tale especially effective is the way he employs doubling to suggest that it is perfectly natural that the narrator should be paranoid about the sound coming from the floorboards.

Poe the tell tale heart