It is true that we are all so transfixed on figuring out the afterlife, that we enthrall ourselves into such horrific stories to fill our minds, just so we can “catch a glimpse” into the other world. We assume that these stories are not true-life, and will never be. Yet we enjoy places ourselves in the character’s shoes, just to see what it would feel like if we were faced with the horror on the pages of these books.
A story that we didn’t discuss, yet is wildly popular and highly read, is “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe surrounds you with the nervousness and mad mind of the narrator, making you feel as though you are the murderer, the mad one. I find this story to be fantastic in many ways, as well as gothic in others. The “fantastic” is created throughout, which causes the reader to draw conclusions as to the missing parts of a plot, as well as the afterthoughts of endings. Why did the story end this way? And what really and truly occurred during this last scene? We are all left wondering, yet we love the fact that we can make up our own endings and scenes to such classic and horrific stories.
The narrator claims that he is “sensitive to what others cannot hear. Sensitive to be able to see and hear things in heaven, hell, and on earth that would otherwise not be experienced”. The over-sensitivity gives way to the reasoning behind why he kills his victim, an old man with a very strange eye. He developed an obsession with the eye, calling it “the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye with a film over it.” No reason other than the obsession gave way to the murder.
For seven nights, the narrator would spend close to seven hours making his way through the creeky door, into the old man’s room, just so that he could witness his “vulture eye”. Every morning after his venture, he would act as cheerful as ever, being cordial and having small-talk with the old man, like nothing ever happened. And on the 8th night of the repeating visits, the narrator startles the old man in his sleep when the lantern he is using accidently clangs against the wooden door. The old man began to moan in terror, scared of the light that was coming before him. And there, in front of him, he saw the vulture eye.
As quickly as the eye caught the light, the narrator’s acute senses were awakened by a noise, which was the rapid beating of a heart. The “fantastic” finally comes into play when the question to the reader is, whose heart is beating so loudly? Is it his own, or the old man’s? The sound began getting louder and louder, as if the narrator believes the neighbors may begin to hear it. So he smothers the old man with his mattress, until the loudly beating heart, would beat no more.
After the old man is dead, the narrator dismembers him, leaving no traces of blood, so that there is no question of murder. He then took the pieces left of the body and placed them beneath the boards of the floor in the old man’s room. And at 4am, a knock came on the door. It was the police, coming to investigate reports of a “shriek”. There seemed to be no evidence after they searched the house, so the narrator pulled up a chair to sit in, on top of the boards that hid beneath it, the old man’s body parts.
The narrator began to hear the old man’s heart yet again. Pounding away in his ears, loudly, and even more loudly. The narrator became wild and uncontrollable, and after not being able to keep his composure, he admitted loudly to the deed of killing the man, and told them to rip up the boards underneath them, exposing the old man’s body. His conscience was literally eating him alive, exposing his guilt. His own beating heart, we assume, is the sound that he keeps hearing. But we are never told that it was his own heart. We have no idea, and in this case, we are dealing with both Gothic and Fantastic horror.
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