Post 5 of 5 in the Reading with Jimmy series on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
In this final post, we come now to the question The Tell-Tale Heart has been building toward from the first word.
Not: did he kill the old man? He told us that at the start.
Not: is he mad? We’ve been wrestling with that for four posts.
The question is this: what does this story show you about how to lead your life based on how this guy led his?
Because that’s why we read classical literature. Not to admire technique, though it is worth admiring. Not to have the plot summarized. We read to learn how other people lead their lives — and in doing so, learn something about how to lead our own.
The Heartbeat — What Is the Narrator Actually Hearing?
Before we get to morality, let’s stop at the heartbeat. Because it’s the detail that breaks him, and it’s worth examining closely.
The narrator hears it twice.
The first time is when he shines the lantern on the old man’s eye, just before the murder:
“Now I say there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”
The second time is when the police officers are sitting in the room, chatting with him, apparently satisfied:
“Yet the sound increased — and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound — much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath — and yet the officers heard it not.”
The officers didn’t hear it.
That phrase – “heard it not” — is everything. If the officers could not hear what he heard, what was he actually hearing?
One interpretation that has been around for a long time: he was suffering from high blood pressure. The symptoms include a ringing or pounding sensation in the ears — the cardiovascular system making itself audible. A heart under that kind of stress can produce exactly the low, persistent sound he describes.
Jimmy finds this interpretation compelling, not because it explains the murder, but because it grounds the narrator’s acute hearing in something physiological rather than supernatural. The disease he claims sharpened his senses may have been real — just not the gift he believed it to be.
But here is the more important question: even if he had high blood pressure, does that justify murder?
Murder and the Moral Compass
When someone takes another life, we enter the realm of morality. There’s no way around it.
What is a moral compass? If you were to look it up, you’d find something like this: an internal sense of right and wrong that guides ethical decisions and behavior. It’s built over time, shaped by your culture, your experiences, your beliefs. It’s not identical for every person. It’s not even identical across every society.
In ancient Sparta, warriors were told: bring home your shield, or be carried home on it. Young people were encouraged to steal — and punished not for stealing, but for being caught. The compass was calibrated entirely differently from ours.
But here is the point: societies have to agree on a compass for order to exist. You cannot have seven billion people each operating on their own private standard of right and wrong. Chaos follows. Which is why every functioning society agrees on certain things. Murder is wrong. Not because it’s inconvenient. Because we have decided — collectively, across centuries — that it is wrong.
Right. And Wrong. Applied to a situation – any situation. Talking in class instead of listening. Taking something from another person’s shopping cart and putting it in yours. Making phony calls to the police department. Giving money to a homeless person., Any situation. That’s what the compass is for.
In our narrator’s mind, it was perfectly sane and perfectly justified to kill the old man. His compass doesn’t match most other people’s. And he cannot see that it doesn’t.
That’s what makes this story so horrific.
If You Think About Murdering Someone, Are You Crazy?
Here’s a question I want to leave with you, because I think it’s the honest one.
If you think about harming someone — not acting on it, just thinking it — does that make you mad?
I remember being at a campfire years ago with a colleague. His young son was acting up, the way young kids do. And this man — a perfectly decent person — blurted out: “Tommy, I’m going to break your arm if you don’t stop.”
He wasn’t going to break his son’s arm. Everyone at that fire knew he wasn’t. In fact, it had no effect on the son because he kept doing what he was doing (do you know why?). The passion escalated in him to language, and for a moment the language touched something dark. That darkness, if you look closely, is in all of us. We are animals after all, aren’t we?
Most of us have such moments. The flash of rage. The thought we would never act on. Most of us let it pass. But there are those, like our narrator, who do not let it pass.
Some people like our narrator cultivate it. Nourish it. Feed it for seven nights. And then act on it.
Is the difference between us and him a matter of kind, or a matter of degree? Or something else?
The answer of course is your moral compass. What does your compass show you is right. Wrong.
What Literature Charged with Meaning Does
Jimmy has always said as Ezra Pound said: literature is language charged with meaning. The charge in The Tell-Tale Heart is in every word — in the True! that opens the story, in the dashes that make the sentences tremble, in the officers heard it not that ends the narrator’s last hope of being believed.
We read classical literature to learn how other people lead their lives. In this case, we learn what happens when a mind loses its connection to a shared moral compass — and what it sounds like from the inside, where everything still seems perfectly reasonable. Not to be like the narrator. But to NOT be like the narrator. Learning isn’t always about what to do, is it? It’s often about what NOT to do.
Gene Kranz, author of Failure is Not an Option and the guy who brought back the astronauts of Apollo 13, wrote reprimanding his trainees that if you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. Because people die if you do the wrong thing.
The beauty of classical literature is that we can watch people do the wrong thing…and no harm in real life. But boy, do we learn something, don’t we?
We also should have learned this: the narrator is human. Recognizably human. That may be the most uncomfortable thing about him. He is not a monster from the outside. He is a person who, from the inside, convinced himself he was fine. But once we get inside, boy, what a sight!
If that doesn’t make you want to examine your own mind a little more carefully, Jimmy doesn’t know what will.
Thank you for reading The Tell-Tale Heart with me. I hope to see you soon.
This is Post 5 of 5 in the Reading with Jimmy series on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Begin the series with Post 1: “A 2,206-Word Murder Story.”
Read The Tell-Tale Heart with Jimmy on this website. Questions or comments? Write to Jimmy at [email protected].