Tall-Tale Heart

The Beating of His Hideous Heart
“The Tall-Tale Heart,” one of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short stories, tells a tale of a mad man and his so called brilliant scheme to kill an old man because of his frightful, vulture like eye. While he goes in detail about the old man’s eye and how it drove him mad, the mad man’s undoing came with the thumbing noise of the old man’s heart after his death. Ironic, is it not? The old man’s heart, the one thing that didn’t bother the mad man, haunted him to confess his actions when, in fact, the old man’s eye drove the mad man to kill. This, perhaps, suggests that the mad man’s insanity grew in him before he actually committed the murder. How can this be and why is it ironic? Read on and the irony might drive you mad as well.
Before we can get to the irony, one must know about “The Tall-Tale Heart.” The story begins with the mad man describing the old man and how he took care of him. The mad man, who actually loved the old man, hated his pale blue, cloudy eye that he described vulture like. To rid of the eye that makes the mad man’s blood run cold, the mad man decides to kill him. He begins to tell how he crept in the old man’s room quietly a week before he committed the awful deed. On the night of the murder, again the mad man crept in the room quietly and slowly. The old man awoke because of a sound. Slowly and silently, the mad man shined a beam of light on the old man’s cold, cloudy, pale blue eye. Can’t taking it any longer, the mad man rushed in and placed the bed on top of the old man fast enough that the old man could only give off one, shrill, shriek into the night. With the bed over the old man, slowly suffocating him, the only audible sound was the slow, labored beating of the heart. With the deed done and the heart finally seized beating, the mad man dismembered the old man and placed his remains under the floorboards.
The next morning and the mad man full of cheer, three police officers knocked on the door for a...