Post 4 of 5 in the Reading with Jimmy series on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
Every story requires a choice before the first word is written. Not what happens. Not who the characters are. Something more fundamental than either of those.
Who tells it?
In The Tell-Tale Heart, a very specific, very deliberate choice is made. We go inside the narrator’s head. First person. I. And that choice is what makes this story a classic.
First Person vs. Third Person
Jimmy always says: first-person narrators are INSIDE the story. Third-person narrators are OUTSIDE it.
That sounds simple enough. The difference it makes is enormous.
Look at the opening lines of The Tell-Tale Heart:
First Person: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.”
Now here is how those same lines would read in third person:
Third Person: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous he had been and is; but why will people say that he is mad? The disease had sharpened his senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.”
Can you feel the difference?
In first person, we are inside the room with him. We are inside his head. He is talking to us. In third person, someone else is telling us about him. We are observers. We are at a distance.
In third person, you might feel sympathy or curiosity. In first person, you feel something much more uncomfortable: proximity. You are right there with a man who is telling you — calmly, he insists — that he heard things in heaven and hell, that he killed an old man, that this proves nothing about his sanity. You are what you can’t be in real life: inside another person’s head.
The Narrator as Filter
Here is the critical thing to understand about first-person narration: the narrator is a filter. Everything we know in The Tell-Tale Heart comes through him.
The old man? We only know him through the narrator’s eyes. We see the old man as the narrator sees him — the eye, the beating heart, the body beneath the floorboards.
The police officers? Same thing. We only know what our narrator tells us about them. Were they really sitting there, chatting, suspecting nothing? Did they really not hear the heartbeat? We have no way to know.
We see what he sees. We hear what he hears. We cannot step outside him.
In Johnny Bear, the first-person narrator tells us the whole story of Johnny Bear – an extraordinary story that if you shifted to a third-person narrator, would certainly not carry the enormous emotion of someone who is experiencing the talent of that big man.
But that is why we read classical literature so carefully. When a story is told in first person, the first question you have to ask is: is this narrator reliable? It’s a question that is already answered: the third-person narrator is always reliable; otherwise, the story would never make any sense.
Is This Guy Reliable?
Every first-person narrator sees himself as reliable. Every one. You and I do the same thing. We tell our stories the way we experienced them, and we believe what we say. The question is whether the people listening to us believe it too.
In this case, from inside the narrator’s own mind, he is completely reliable to himself as himself. He is telling you exactly what happened — at least as he experienced it. He is not trying to deceive you (or is he). He thinks he is giving you the facts.
From our point of view? He is nuts.
And that gap — between what he believes and what we see in his words— is where the horror is. It is also where the classical literature lives. We are watching a man distort the reality of himself. In other words, he just can’t look at himself and see himself as he really is (i.e., nervous, for example, if that’s true, how does a nervous guy stand for an hour without moving if that really happened.)
Jimmy’s view: he is reliable to himself. He is unreliable to everyone listening to him. As for whether we believe him, that judgment is yours. But the evidence of the text gives us very little reason to think this guy is sane.
The Other Characters Through His Eyes
Because everything is filtered through the narrator, it’s worth noticing how little our knowledge of the other characters actually is.
The old man: we know he had a pale blue eye with a film over it. We know the narrator loved him. We know almost nothing else. We don’t know his name, his history, his relationship to the narrator. He exists in this story only as the object of a fixation.
The police officers: they arrive, they sit, they talk. The narrator chats with them. They seem unconcerned. And then the narrator breaks — and what happens after that, Poe doesn’t give us. The story ends with the confession.
Everyone in The Tell-Tale Heart is seen through one pair of eyes. Eyes that, by the narrator’s own account, could hear things in hell.
In the final post, we go to the hardest question the story asks: morality, murder, and what this story forces us to examine in ourselves.
This is Post 4 of 5 in the Reading with Jimmy series on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Continue with Post 5: “Your Moral Compass and a Heartbeat Under the Floor.”
Read The Tell-Tale Heart with Jimmy on this website. Questions or comments? Write to Jimmy at [email protected].