What makes you

Suspicious?
British Language School
Mohamed sherif
Grade 12
 In this research you will get to
know:

I. Edgar Allan Poe

II. His list of work

III. About his tell-tale heart short

story

IV. My personal opinion

V. Sources + (tell-tale heart) movie

 Edgar Allan Poe
 Edgar Allan Poe was born, January 19, 1809 in
Boston as an American writer, poet, editor, and
literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry
and short stories, particularly his tales of
mystery and the macabre. He is widely
regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in
the United States and of American literature as
a whole, and he was one of the country's
earliest practitioners of the short story. He is
also generally considered the inventor of the
detective fiction genre and is further credited
with contributing to the emerging genre of
science fiction. Poe was the first well-known
American writer to earn a living through writing
alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and
career.
 Poe got a job as a journalist to support himself
and his young wife while he worked on the
stories and poems that would earn him the title
“father of the modern mystery”. A master of
suspense, he wrote works that were often dark
and full of horrifying images. Poems such as
“the raven” and short stories such as “the pit
and the pendulum” brought him fame but no
fortune. Poverty intensified his despair when his
wife, Virginia, fell ill and died. Deeply
depressed, Poe died two years later after being
found on the streets of Baltimore. Poe’s
obituary stated he was a man of astonishing
skill, a dreamer who walked “in madness or
melancholy.”
 His list of works:

Tales:
 "The Black Cat"
 "The Cask of Amontillado"
 "A Descent into the Maelström"
 "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"
 "The Fall of the House of Usher"
 "The Gold-Bug"
 "Hop-Frog"
 "The Imp of the Perverse"
 "Ligeia"
 "The Masque of the Red Death"
 "Morella"
 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
 "The Oval Portrait"
 "The Pit and the Pendulum"
 "The Premature Burial"
 "The Purloined Letter"
 "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor
Fether"
 "The Tell-Tale Heart"
 "Loss of Breath (tale)"
 Poetry
 "Al Aaraaf"
 "Annabel Lee"
 "The Bells"
 "The City in the Sea"
 "The Conqueror Worm"
 "A Dream Within a Dream"
 "Eldorado"
 "Eulalie"
 "The Haunted Palace"
 "To Helen"
 "Lenore"
 "Tamerlane"
 "The Raven"
 "Ulalume"
 Is
Feeling
Believing?

Has something or someone ever seemed

dangerous or untrustworthy to you?

The feeling you had was suspicion. While

suspicion might come from a misunderstanding,
it can also be a warning that someone is very
wrong. In this story, youll meet a man whose
own suspicoins are his downfall.
 Addressing the story in a brief way:
An unnamed narrator opens the story by addressing
the reader and claiming that he is nervous but not mad.
He says that he is going to tell a story in which he will
defend his sanity yet confess to having killed an old
man. His motivation was neither passion nor desire for
money, but rather a fear of the man’s pale blue eye.
Again, he insists that he is not crazy because his cool
and measured actions, though criminal, are not those of
a madman. Every night, he went to the old man’s
apartment and secretly observed the man sleeping. In
the morning, he would behave as if everything were
normal. After a week of this activity, the narrator
decides, somewhat randomly, that the time is right
actually to kill the old man.
When the narrator arrives late on the eighth night,
though, the old man wakes up and cries out. The
narrator remains still, stalking the old man as he sits
awake and frightened. The narrator understands how
frightened the old man is, having also experienced the
lonely terrors of the night. Soon, the narrator hears a
dull pounding that he interprets as the old man’s
terrified heartbeat. Worried that a neighbor might
hear the loud thumping, he attacks and kills the old
man. He then dismembers the body and hides the
pieces below the floorboards in the bedroom. He is
careful not to leave even a drop of blood on the floor.
As he finishes his job, a clock strikes the hour of four.
At the same time, the narrator hears a knock at the
street door. The police have arrived, having been called
by a neighbor who heard the old man shriek. The
narrator is careful to be chatty and to appear normal.
He leads the officers all over the house without acting
suspiciously. At the height of his bravado, he even
brings them into the old man’s bedroom to sit down and
talk at the scene of the crime. The policemen do not
suspect a thing. The narrator is comfortable until he
starts to hear a low thumping sound. He recognizes the
low sound as the heart of the old man, pounding away
beneath the floorboards. He panics, believing that the
policemen must also hear the sound and know his guilt.
Driven mad by the idea that they are mocking his agony
with their pleasant chatter, he confesses to the crime
and shrieks at the men to rip up the floorboards.
 Analysis:
Poe uses his words economically in the “Tell-Tale
Heart”—it is one of his shortest stories—to provide a
study of paranoia and mental deterioration. Poe strips
the story of excess detail as a way to heighten the
murderer’s obsession with specific and unadorned
entities: the old man’s eye, the heartbeat, and his own
claim to sanity. Poe’s economic style and pointed
language thus contribute to the narrative content, and
perhaps this association of form and content truly
exemplifies paranoia. Even Poe himself, like the beating
heart, is complicit in the plot to catch the narrator in
his evil game.

As a study in paranoia, this story illuminates the

psychological contradictions that contribute to a
murderous profile. For example, the narrator admits, in
the first sentence, to being dreadfully nervous, yet he
is unable to comprehend why he should be thought mad.
He articulates his self-defense against madness in
terms of heightened sensory capacity. Unlike the
similarly nervous and hypersensitive Roderick Usher in
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” who admits that he
feels mentally unwell, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale
Heart” views his hypersensitivity as proof of his sanity,
not a symptom of madness. This special knowledge
enables the narrator to tell this tale in a precise and
complete manner, and he uses the stylistic tools of
narration for the purposes of his own sanity plea.
However, what makes this narrator mad—and most
unlike Poe—is that he fails to comprehend the coupling
of narrative form and content. He masters precise
form, but he unwittingly lays out a tale of murder that
betrays the madness he wants to deny.

Another contradiction central to the story involves the

tension between the narrator’s capacities for love and
hate. Poe explores here a psychological mystery—that
people sometimes harm those whom they love or need
in their lives. Poe examines this paradox half a century
before Sigmund Freud made it a leading concept in his
theories of the mind. Poe’s narrator loves the old man.
He is not greedy for the old man’s wealth, nor vengeful
because of any slight. The narrator thus eliminates
motives that might normally inspire such a violent
murder. As he proclaims his own sanity, the narrator
fixates on the old man’s vulture-eye. He reduces the
old man to the pale blue of his eye in obsessive fashion.
He wants to separate the man from his “Evil Eye” so he
can spare the man the burden of guilt that he
attributes to the eye itself. The narrator fails to see
that the eye is the “I” of the old man, an inherent part
of his identity that cannot be isolated as the narrator
perversely imagines.
The murder of the old man illustrates the extent to
which the narrator separates the old man’s identity
from his physical eye. The narrator sees the eye as
completely separate from the man, and as a result, he
is capable of murdering him while maintaining that he
loves him. The narrator’s desire to eradicate the man’s
eye motivates his murder, but the narrator does not
acknowledge that this act will end the man’s life. By
dismembering his victim, the narrator further deprives
the old man of his humanity. The narrator confirms his
conception of the old man’s eye as separate from the
man by ending the man altogether and turning him into
so many parts. That strategy turns against him when
his mind imagines other parts of the old man’s body
working against him.

The narrator’s newly heightened sensitivity to sound

ultimately overcomes him, as he proves unwilling or
unable to distinguish between real and imagined sounds.
Because of his warped sense of reality, he obsesses
over the low beats of the man’s heart yet shows little
concern about the man’s shrieks, which are loud enough
both to attract a neighbor’s attention and to draw the
police to the scene of the crime. The police do not
perform a traditional, judgmental role in this story.
Ironically, they aren’t terrifying agents of authority or
brutality. Poe’s interest is less in external forms of
power than in the power that pathologies of the mind
can hold over an individual. The narrator’s paranoia and
guilt make it inevitable that he will give himself away.
The police arrive on the scene to give him the
opportunity to betray himself. The more the narrator
proclaims his own cool manner, the more he cannot
escape the beating of his own heart, which he mistakes
for the beating of the old man’s heart. As he confesses
to the crime in the final sentence, he addresses the
policemen as “"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no
more!,” indicating his inability to distinguish between
their real identity and his own villainy.
My opinion:

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible

sanity”. -Edgar Allan Poe
While some Poe´s stories have a kind of fun and playful
feel to them in spite of their themes of death, murder
and betrayal, "Tell-tale heart" makes us want to cry. As
the audience, we can find sadness and nervousness in
every line we read. This story might not seem sad at
the beginning; because we might not take seriously
what the narrator is saying, so it can be seen as a joke.
Maybe, we feel a little superior as we untangle all the
discrepancies. But, later on, we realize we have read
the story of a man who, plagued by diseases of the
body of the mind, is in a near constant state of stress,
nerves, and meltdown. In my opinion the writer makes a
remarkable job creating the main character, because
the story uses an unreliable narrator very effectively;
driving the story without giving too much away, to keep
it tense. Also the character was well described, even
though we don’t know the name or the age we still can
make an image of how the character looked like and
behaved. And also make us try to make our own
predictions about the story. I believe that the Tell-
tale heart contains a great message behind its mystery.
For me the message was that Poe wanted to make clear
how we look upon each other for not what's on the
inside, but mostly the outside. I liked this story as well
as others of Poe because it keeps you on the edge of
your seat. I also like the hidden themes interwoven in
the story. After I read the book I wondered what
would have happened if the man never confessed.
Would he have gone mad and took his own life? I think
Poe would never have answered the questions that
people asked about the story.

Sources:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
 https://www.poemuseum.org/who-was-edgar-allan-
poe
 (The story) https://www.poemuseum.org/the-tell-
tale-heart
 (The movie) https://youtu.be/MMBihsb14-4