Edgar Allan Poe, the grandfather of Gothic literature. He is best known for his short stories and poetry and has rightfully been awarded the honorable title of The King of the Macabre. He has written many stories, but is most well known for his stories “The Raven”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, and “The Fall of House Usher”. Poe’s disturbing and twisted tales of madmen, death, and revenge disturb the comforted and comfort the disturbed.
I had found a collection of stories in my schools library while I was attempting to dodge a group of guys who had deemed it their life’s purpose to torment me. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was in the compilation of tales and caught my eye. I wish I remembered the title of the book, but even when I try to find it I cannot. After I read the story, it felt as though a new part of my brain had been unlocked, like it was okay to lean into the dark and twisted. And so I did. Of course that wasn’t seen as okay and did nothing to make the bullying any better, but I felt seen.
As I have continued to read Edgar Allan Poe’s literature, many questions have presented themselves to me, one of the most prevalent being: “What was Poe trying to communicate with his literature?”
My personal favorite Poe story is that of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. From the very beginning you know that you in for quite the tale as the first sentences are; “It’s true! Yes, I have been ill, very ill. But why do you say that I have lost control of my mind, why do you say that I am mad?” This narrator whose story we follow, claims to be same although he talks about an old man’s filmy blue eye. In fact, he’s obsessed with it and it drives him to murder, dismembers, and bury the old man beneath the floorboards of his house. He ends up confessing to the homicide after the beating of the dead man’s heart drives him over the edge of guilt.
“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 earth” is a quote that has stuck with me. The unnamed narrator refers to himself as diseased and ill throughout the tale, never insane, nor schizophrenic. He is in denial, or at least not aware of what he has become. Although the narrator does not believe that something is wrong with him, it is blatantly obvious that he is not in good mental health. A person in good mental health cannot hear “all things in heaven and earth”. In my eyes, this madman must have schizophrenia or some other form of mental distress. Why else would he manage to hear a dead man’s heart beating from beneath the floorboards?
To relate this text back to the title, what is the meaning of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”? Most will give you simple answer that the guilt of doing something terrible will way you down. While yes, the narrator did drive himself farther insane with guilt, I believe there is another meaning.
That meaning being that human’s as a whole, will try to find ways to justify any action that they want to make, especially the inhumane and cruel. The narrator claims that the old man’s eye tormented him and he needed to be rid of it forever. The eye is merely his justification of wanting to kill the old man. But, the issues that led to the unnamed narrator murdering his old friend were entirely because something was wrong in his mind. It was not the victims fault. No matter, the narrator did drive himself further into insanity with the guilt, as even though he got away with the murder, his subconsciousness knew, no matter what the made excuse was, that the crime that had been committed was wrong.
All of Poe’s writing of the morbid and of madmen, leads to the question; “Was Edgar Allan Poe mad, or was he just a product of his unfortunate life?” Some call him crazy, but i believe that he was just misunderstood. I believe that his terrible upbringing lead to him becoming the fantastically morbid writer that he did. And I think, that him writing the way that he did, has opened up what is considered, “good writing”, and showed others the dark and twisted things that lie under the surface of everyday life. In my eyes, he aimed to show us that death is a constant cloud that that looms over humanity and that it has devastating consequences on one’s mental state.
The Golden Thread 
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