Author's Note: Another piece written for my AP Language class, analyzing the stylistic character of Edgar Allen Poe's wonderful The Tell-Tale Heart, which I am absolutely obsessed with.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I don't own TTH.
The Tells of the Hideous Heart:
A Stylistic Analysis of "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Madness- more specifically, the quantifying of it in trenchant, disconcerting, thought-provoking prose- often seems a confounding and equally arresting prospect into which writers delve either gleefully, reluctantly, or not at all. Perspicuously, the latter cases prove to be as far from the truth as one can get in exploring Edgar Allen Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart, the stylistic construction of which serves but one calamitous end: elucidating in rabid, glorious detail the indubitable insanity of the work's ill-fated narrator. The syntactical structure, disjointed and chaotic, lends to Poe's prose a sense of manic desperation and urgency; the content, riddled with repetitions, hyphenations, exclamations, parallelisms, and an eclectic mix of sentences both convoluted and achingly concise, helps to further emphasize the disorder residing within the narrator's mind. The adroit interplay between all of these disparate elements ultimately makes known to the reader the puissance of the development of this lunacy when taking into account Poe's consummate purpose, which is the depiction of human mania and conscience at its terrifically gruesome best.
Right from the outset, Poe creates in his narrator a tone so deliriously frenetic and distraught that not pitying the man proves nigh on impossible. "True!" he exclaims, "-nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad?" (Para. 1). The anadiplotic repetition of 'very, very' to separate the clauses quantifying his 'nervousness' emphasizes strongly the extent to which his unknown mania exerts a profoundly detrimental impact over his mental state, as does the off-kilter pacing of the line and suddenness of the hyphenated, exclamatory interjection. This latter technique in particular is one that Poe utilizes frequently throughout the piece, as when the narrator, gloating over his perceived 'sagacity' and 'cleverness' of 'dissimulation,' discomfits the reader with a jubilant "Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this?" (Para. 3), or when he later begins raving in increasingly potent paranoia over the 'mockery' the police make of his 'horror:'
"Oh God! what could I do? I foamed- I raved- I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise...grew louder- louder- louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!- no, no! They heard!- they suspected!- they knew!- they were making a mockery of my horror!" (Para. 10).
These excerpts number among many that truly serve to illustrate the illusion of madness that Poe so successfully portrays in his poor narrator. Their diction, if nothing else, connotes without fail the sort of images one typically associates with burgeoning or previously existing madness: 'foamed,' 'raved,' and 'swore' all imply an impressive loss of control and a frightful descent into the hellish throes of paranoia, hallucinatory terror, and mania worthy of institutionalization, while the abruptly intercalated cries of 'Oh God,' 'Almighty God,' and 'ha' prove eerily reminiscent of both deleteriously devout zealots and sadistic, jocose killers of the ilk of Jack the Ripper. The construction of the phrasing alone dissipates utterly what little substance the narrator's inutile rationalizations and assurances might have managed to build.
Actually, this latter point would be quite a prudent one to address. Throughout the story, the narrator constantly attempts to convince the reader of his sanity in various ways: by citing the instance of some 'disease' which "had sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled them" (Para. 1), by praising his own "sagacity" and "cleverness" in his work, through which he so "wisely...proceeded- with what caution- with what foresight- with what dissimulation…!" (Para. 3), by presenting to the police a most pleasant and affable persona. A goodly number of the parallels created in the aforementioned excerpts exemplify this attempted rationalization quite well; they create within the prose not only a disconcerting sense of disjunction and balanced disorder, but also an equally puissant tone of fevered desperation. The narrator himself may be absolutely convinced of his sanity, but it seems far more likely that he is actually trying to prove to himself as much as the reader that he is, in fact, reasonably sane (a dubious 'fact' which is contradicted by virtually every other syntactical and dictional aspect of the piece). The parallel phrases possess a latent kind of breathlessness and vehement fervor that ultimately work to convey justification; he cannot bear to admit to himself the truth of the matter, and subsequently tries to justify to himself the excusability of his actions by referencing ad nauseum the care with which he prepared this baleful murder.
This desperation, however, contrasts greatly with the condescending, humoring tone of the man's less...impassioned declarations. Statements such as "Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me" (Para. 3) stand in diametrically opposed to the incredibly convoluted and periodic utterances made in his more manic moments; those phrases, with their excessively hyphenated, exclamatorily punctuated, grossly detailed constructions, seem to burn to the core with lunacy, while the succinct brevity of the former ones all but laughs in the faces of the latter, implying within the narrator a staunch belief in his own sanity and clarity of purpose which his later frantic rationalizations and even more hysterical actions soundly belie.
There can be no doubt about it; this man is mad. Poe is to be acclaimed for devising a character of such starkly twisted and pitiable proportions through the mere use of sagaciously crafted syntax and deadly descriptive diction, giving no other characterizations through which the reader's understanding of the narrator may be enriched; they simply are not necessary. Poe's language alone is enough to establish a tone of complete and utter insanity, epitomizing perfectly the chaos, disorder, and frenzied, tortured desperation that are intrinsic elements of the madman's mind. This language strikes the core deep, fills the reader's heart with uneasy discomfiture and cursory pity alike; one can never know what madness exists in the minds of others, what horrors shape their thoughts and guide their unwieldy hands. One can sit in safety, and read, and allow the delirious stops and fits and starts to titillate eager, sound mental faculties, but one can never know. Madmen know nothing, after all...is that not so?