Varieties of Psychopathological Experience by Carney Landis

If this is true, then the question of artistry is forestalled. It is possible, of course, that the narrator’s acuteness is as much a delusion as the sound may have been a Short tale, dwell in this, one of his shortest, upon the apparently inconsequential detail of his narrator’s acuteness of hearing? Heart, then what was it? If he really heard nothing, if it was only a hallucination, then why did Poe, who advocated economy in the If in fact he heard something other than his own “came to my ears,” he says before murdering the old man “the noise was not within my ears,” he insistsĪs he describes himself sitting over the dismembered body chatting with the police. (5) Moreover, he insists that this sound originated outside of him. Heard or believes he heard, both before and after the murder, to have been “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes whenĮnveloped in cotton”. You,” he reiterates, “that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?” He describes what he Above all was the sense of hearing acute.” (4) “And have I not told “Theĭisease,” he tells us of himself at the opening of the story, “had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - notĭulled them. This larger question stems from the narrator’s repeated insistence upon his acuteness of hearing. These answers may seem to satisfy, they really only raise a still larger question, a crucial critical one involving the artistry of the Then “pounding in the murderer’s ears after the man was dead.” (3) Although any of (2) Only one commentator feels that the sound was indeed that of the old man’s heart, first heard in fact and Identify the sound either as an hallucination or as the narrator’s misapprehension of his own heart beat. The narrator himself believes the sound to have been the heart of his victimīeating even after his dismembered body has been concealed beneath the floor boards of his bedchamber. To reveal both the crime and his own guilt to the police. The mystery surrounds the source of the sound that drove Poe’s deranged narrator to murder an old man and subsequently Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a genuine mystery story, one that thus far has eluded satisfactory The Lesser Death-Watch and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1)

Varieties of Psychopathological Experience by Carney Landis