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.

There is a more than even chance that you have at some point in your life read ‘The Telltale Heart’. There is a reason for this. The Telltale Heart is a story almost everyone in English speaking countries encounter at school in an English lit class because it is much beloved of English Curriculum makers. One of the main reasons for this is it is short enough for a teacher dealing with abused attention spans to read aloud in class, or give teenagers to read with some hope they will get to the end, and even possibly engage with it.

It is pure coincidence that it also happens to be one of the most perfect examples in all of English literature of corrupt first person narration. This is to say a narrator who’s version of events can not in any way be taken at face value.

In the very first paragraph, the one I have quoted above, the narrator takes pains to insist on his own personal sanity, something he repeatedly continues doing throughout. As he does so he goes on to explain that he lived with an old man to whom he professes no ill feeling. Nor, he tells us, did he have the slightest design upon the old mans money and property. Such is his love for the old man that if it wasn’t for one of his eyes being a filmy pale blue vulture like eye as we are told by the narrator, ever giving him an evil look, then he would never have murderously slaughtered him, chop up his body into tiny pieces, and hidden those pieces under the floor boards.

Our delightful, so very sane, narrator goes on to provide more proof of his sanity, such as the meticulous way he plans his crime, how carefully he creeps into the old mans room each night. Taking whole hours just to open the old mans bedroom door, a inch at a time, due to the squeaking of the hinges. Before observing his pray for hours on end but not acting on his need to kill for a week, because he loves the old man. he does not in fact act until the old mans ‘evil’ eye opens one night while he watches. Because it is the ‘evil’ aspect of the old mans eye that is his homicidal obsession.

All the rest of that aside, that it doesn’t occur to this ‘sane’ man to oil the door hinges during the day is some what telling… but maybe thats just me…

The narrator offers still more ‘proof’ of his sanity, having hacked the old man to death the night he opened his ‘evil’ eye, the careful way in which he butchers the old mans corpse and hides it under the floorboards, clearly displays he is of clear mind. For only a sane man would be so careful and considered in the concealment of his crime.

A logic by which you could prove the sanity of Doctor Cripin as he was entirely sane as he used an acid bath to dispose of his victims… Or indeed, the demon barber of Fleet street, Sweeney Todd, was in complete control of his faculties as he used his victims to supply the meat of his to Mrs Lovett of the pie shop down stairs…

Though it has to be said Mrs Lovetst’ pies were damn fine…

All this proof our narrator offers as to his sanity is in justification his final action in the story. When the police have arrived at the behest of a neighbor who heard screams in the night. The narrator shows them around the scene of the crime. Unperturbed by their presence, at least at first. But then he begins to hear a dull monotonous thudding sound coming from under the floor boards and his horror when he realises what it is.

How can they not hear it too?

That relentless thud, thud , thud that is the beating of of the tell tale heart of his victim.

It could be argued that when our Dear Edgar wrote The Telltale Heart he perfected the art of the short phycological horror story. this is certainly an argument the teachers of English Literature have been putting forward for a centaury or more. It is certainly the architype for stories narrated by those not entirely of sound mind. Many of the short stories of Robert W Chambers use the same core concept of a corrupt narrator who’s words can not be trusted at face value because their questionable sanity. Lovecraft uses the same trick repeatedly but never more so than in his seminal work ‘The Rats in the Walls‘. Part of the attraction of such stories is the reader is free to interpret the events being related. Free to decide if events did happen how they are told of if the narrators mental faculties twist teh telling.

As such tales go however, The Telltale Heart is not the most complex. Instead it is merely one of the first such stories, blurring the line between the narrators reality and the truth in such a corrupt fashion. In that it is frankly masterful. A story you know you can’t believe, but somehow want to. You want the heart to be beating under the floorboards, for all it becomes increasingly clear the narrator is insane. For all it is obviously his guilt making him imagine the hearts baneful rhythm. The image of a still beating heart beneath the floorboards remains a provocative thought provoking one.

It is a tale that can, and does, fire the imagination of even those most jaded of readers, bored teenagers in an English Lit classroom.

I speak from experience…

A SANITY OF RAVENS PEEKING THROUGH THE FLOORBOARDS

Should you read it: Yes, Though you more than likely already have at some point, read it again anyway…

Bluffers fact: Despite being one of the most evocative images in literature, for one generation at least it is surpassed by another heart beating under floorboards. The heart of Frank Cotton hidden beneath the floorboards of the attic in his old house, when his brother cuts himself and drips blood on the floorboards it seeps through and the heart begins to beat, as it does a circulatory system starts to rebuild itself around the heart ands slowly reform into Frank and drags his soul free of hell. Something a certain Cenobite calls Pinhead is less than chuffed about…

This incase you don’t get the reference, is one of the most graphic and surreal scenes in Clive Barkers Hellraiser. A movie based on Clive’s original novella The Hellbound Heart. A movie scene it is unwise to watch while tripping on mushrooms…

How I know this is between me and the later 80’s…