payment page
Like many Poe short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” focuses primarily on the immediate action of the story, and spends almost no time on its context. Thus, the true character of the narrator’s victim, the old man, remains largely a mystery. We do not actually know what sort of relationship exists between the narrator and the old man other than that they live in the same house. They may be related, a father and son, or uncle and nephew. They could be master and apprentice of some sort of craft, or master and his servant. They may merely be landlord and tenant. Curiouser still, the narrator goes out of his way to characterize the old man as harmless, insisting that the old man has never done him any wrong. The blank slate nature of the old man makes him a completely blameless victim, emphasizing that the narrator’s crime is a product of his own mind.
Our only potential hint into the old man’s character is through the narrator and his obsession with the old man’s single blue, filmy eye. The eye’s appearance itself is likely a medical issue stemming from the man’s old age, but the narrator’s fixation on the eye, if it comes from anything other than the narrator’s discomfort with illness or disability, may offer a clue. For example, some scholars have suggested that the narrator’s outsized fear of the old man’s eye is due to the narrator feeling surveilled or judged by the old man, hinting perhaps that the old man was strict or nosy. The narrator associates the eye with that of a vulture. “Vulture” can colloquially suggest that the narrator felt the old man took advantage of him in some way, despite his protestations that the old man never wronged him. However, by the same token, vultures are also birds associated with death and decay, and the old man’s eye is likely a physical manifestation of the old man’s aging and mortality. Thus, the narrator’s discomfort could have little to do with the man or even the eye, but with a desire to remove signs of death from his sight.
