Post 2 of 5 in the Reading with Jimmy series on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
I always tell you: the first sentence matters. The first word matters. Whatever classical text we’re reading together, we start at the beginning and we stay there until we know what we’re dealing with.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, you will read one of the most loaded opening sentences in American literature. Two sentences, actually. And when you slow down and really read them — the way Jimmy reads, which is to say carefully, critically, word by word — you realize that everything about this narrator is already in those words.
Let’s see what I’m talking about.
The First Two Sentences
“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.”
Read those out loud. Slowly. Deliberately. Notice what happens.
There are pauses everywhere. Dashes. A semicolon. An exclamation point after the very first word. This sentence doesn’t flow — it lurches. It stops. It starts again. It insists.
That’s not an accident. That’s punctuation as performance.
“True!” — A Trumpet Blast
The first word is True. With an exclamation point and a dash after it.
True!—
Think about that. Before he tells you anything — before you know who this person is, what happened, where you are — he is already defending himself. He is already arguing with you.
Who does that? Who opens a conversation with “True!”?
Someone who knows you’re about to doubt him. Someone who has already anticipated your skepticism and is getting ahead of it. The exclamation point blares out like a trumpet announcing someone’s arrival. He wants your attention, and he wants you to know he is serious.
Today, sometimes people say, “I’ll be honest with you.” Does that mean everything they have been telling you up until that time was a lie? Think about words!
One word in this case, and we already know: this man is trying to convince us of something.
“Nervous” — The Word in Dashes
The next word: nervous is set off by dashes on both sides.
—nervous—
The dashes create a pause before and after. The word floats there, isolated, surrounded by silence. It almost reads like an admission he didn’t want to make.
And then he doubles down: very, very dreadfully nervous.
Note the repetition of very. Dreadfully means extremely, terribly, to a severe degree — it’s an adverb intensifying an already intense state. He isn’t just nervous. He is very, very dreadfully nervous. The sentence is trembling on the page before he even tells you why. You can feel the page shaking, can’t you?
“I Had Been and Am” — Time Collapses
Here’s where it gets grammatically interesting, and grammar is not a small thing when you’re reading.
I had been and am.
“Had been” is a perfect tense — it describes something completed before another point in time. In other words, the nervousness is already in the past. Done. Over.
But then: and am.
“Am” is present tense. He is still nervous. Right now. As he tells you this story, he is very, very dreadfully nervous. The sentence reaches backward into the past and drags the nervousness right into the present moment. Time collapses. His condition is continuous.
Why does this matter? Because we are not reading a calm reflection on past events. We are inside something that is still happening.
The Question That Follows
After the semicolon — that pause, that breath — comes the question:
“But why will you say that I am mad?”
Not: “why do you say.” Will. Future tense. He is anticipating that you are going to call him mad. He has already decided that’s where this is going.
And then he makes his case: the disease sharpened his senses. Not destroyed them. Not dulled them.
“I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.”
Let me ask you something. If someone said that to you — if you met them on the street and they told you they heard all things in heaven and earth, and many things in hell — what would you do?
Jimmy would draw back slowly and find a reason to be somewhere else.
And then he asks: “How, then, am I mad?”
That’s his argument. That’s his proof of sanity. He hears everything. Therefore he is not crazy.
Does that logic hold?
The Word “Hearken”
Before he begins his story, he uses one more word worth noticing: Hearken!
It’s an archaic word — an older way of saying pay attention. He follows it with: “and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
Calmly. He’s going to tell it calmly.
He just told you he is very, very dreadfully nervous. Now he is going to be calm. These two things cannot both be true. And yet he says them both in the same breath, and he doesn’t notice the contradiction.
That is your first real signal. Not the hearing things in hell. Not the anticipatory defensiveness. This: he cannot see that he is contradicting himself.
In the next post, we go inside the obsession — the eye, the logic, and the question of what it actually means to be mad.
This is Post 2 of 5 in the Reading with Jimmy series on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Continue with Post 3: “The Eye, the Obsession, and a Flawed Syllogism.”
Read The Tell-Tale Heart with Jimmy on this website. Questions or comments? Write to Jimmy at [email protected].