CONTINUE TO BILLING/PAYMENT

“TRUE! — NERVOUS — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” So begins what may be the most famous short story of all time: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe. First published in 1843, the story recounts a heinous act — murdering a housemate and stuffing his body beneath the floorboards — and the narrator’s attempt to rationalize it after the fact. While the crime takes up most of the story, the drama lies elsewhere: in the mind of the narrator, as he strains to make sense of the senseless thing he’s done. Poe’s style, all em dashes and italics, is the dark mirror of the agony it portrays: pulled apart by anxiety, the narrator’s mind ultimately comes undone in the story’s final line. Mistaking the hammer of his own heart for that of the dead man, he breaks down the wall between his inner monologue and the outside world: “[T]ear up the planks! here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!”

But what tale does the heart tell? On the surface, Poe’s story is about the unbearable nature of guilt, his narrator a precursor to Raskolnikov cowering in his flat or Stephen Dedalus sweating in church. The thumping of the titular organ has become a shorthand for criminal conscience, for what happens when we can’t let certain things slide. But beneath the crime and cover-up is an account of thinking in general, of how mind and matter flow into one another in ways we can’t control. The murder plot, which seems to come from somewhere else (“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain”), sharpens the narrator’s senses and steadies his hand. But guilt is something physical, too: ringing in his ears, beating through his feet. Poe not only makes us feel the tortured dissembling he describes, but he also seems to insist that thinking is feeling: minds are always battling to keep the passions in check lest they burst forth in catastrophic ways. The heart, in other words, tells a tale of the mind — and what happens when it is pushed to the limit.

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