Dissemble No More

Edgar Allan Poe first published “The Tell-Tale Heart” in 1843, and despite the short story being 180 years old, it still grips our attention. We know from the opening line that the unnamed narrator has done something awful, and we know that he is desperate to somehow justify it: “True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”

The narrator proceeds to describe his neighbour, who possesses “the eye of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The mere sight of that eye makes the narrator’s blood run cold, “so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” We learn this in the second paragraph, yet our chronicler insists we have it all wrong. “You fancy me mad,” he says to us. “Madmen know nothing.”

From there, the narrator describes the depths of his knowledge: how he planned a murder, how he methodically spied on the...