The Tell Tale HeartThe Tell-Tale Heart

I first read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart in sixth grade, and somehow, after all these years and all the books I have read since, it is still one of the best short stories I have ever encountered. It was probably my first real introduction to psychological fiction—not a story driven by what happens, but by what is happening inside someone’s head.

The plot itself is almost ridiculously simple: a man kills an old man because he cannot stand his eye, hides the body under the floorboards, and then essentially confesses because he becomes convinced that he can still hear the dead man’s heart beating. What blew my mind was the narration. His thoughts jump, repeat, accelerate, contradict themselves. He insists that he is perfectly sane while providing increasingly convincing evidence that he absolutely is not. Yet somehow I could follow every turn of his mind. The writing is fragmented and almost breathless, but never confusing; its disorder has its own logic.

I think The Tell-Tale Heart was the first story that made me realize a narrator did not have to be trustworthy—or even mentally stable—for me to enter their mind. Poe makes insanity strangely readable. The heartbeat may not even be real, but by the end I almost feel as if I can hear it too. That was fascinating to me in sixth grade, and honestly, it still is.