Edgar Allan Poe :The Tell-Tale Heart

[Libra]

Can't hide anything anymore,even the heart tattles.


The Tell-Tale Heart

 

[Occlith]

Great suspense and tension sequences - first the lead-up to the murder and then to the revealing of the crime.

"Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?" How, indeed?

What do you think Libra? (you chose the story, after all) But all members, please feel free to comment on this story.

 

[Eva]

I was very little when I read this story for the first time, and I didn't quite get it. I thought it was just another inexplicable horror story, or "monster story" as I called them, and that the heart really was beating. So my earliest impression of Poe was that his stories were rather cheap.

Anyway:

...observe how healthily - how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

By the end, he isn't telling the story calmly at all. Even his effort to sound calm--what he’s pinning his hopes on as the simplest way to prove that he's sane--fails completely.

 

[Libra]

Great suspense and tension sequences - first the lead-up to the murder and then to the revealing of the crime."Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?" How, indeed?

What do you think Libra? (you chose the story, after all) But all members, please feel free to comment on this story.

Intense to say the least,he is trying to persuade us and himself that he is not mad.From the first paragraph he calls it a disease and that he has heard many things in Heaven and Hell,meaning he has heard (and gone)evil in some part of his mind.

The "eye" I think scared him because he probably thought it could see his evilness.

I could just picture him looking in the room and turning around ,his eyes buldged and intense with a wicked smirk.

"TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily - how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

 

[hil-billy]

I really love this story, the voice and how the emotions change throughout is just amazing

 

[Justin91]

I really love this story.

About six years ago I went to the amusement park Cedar Point during the halloween Haunted weekends. This is where they showcase haunted houses and such. That night, I watched a performance of the Tell tale heart by a very talented and convincing actor. The setting was an old insane asylum, and he did a wonderful job of going from a seemingly logical, wrongfully accused man (with a few nervouse ticks thrown in), and soon, by the end of his perfomance he was simply a madman...

I talked to the gent for sometime before his next perfomance, he had an incredible story actually...

When I returned home, I reread all of Poe's short stories with renewed interest.