Self-Consciousness In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Fear of judgement – or any fear of being ill-perceived or wrongly viewed – is a powerful motivator. Those who struggle with self-consciousness often surprise even themselves with what they will do to cope with this struggle. Thus, human psychology has probed the curiosity of many writers, and Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. Psychology is a prevalent subject in his analysis of human nature, and has become a vital theme of many of his short stories. That said, authors like Poe are renowned for the portrayal of their character’s psyche and the way it affects their actions. Specifically, in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator is a man deeply troubled by struggles with self-consciousness, and it is this self-consciousness that makes him kill
The narrator begins his story by explaining that the reason he killed the old man was because of his eye: “Whenever [the old man’s eye] fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so, by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man.” (23) Under the old man’s watchful gaze, the narrator is uncomfortable and uneasy. However, although it is the eye that bothers him so and not the old man himself, the narrator is still discomfited and overly self-conscious: “[I]t was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.” (24) The narrator’s self-conscious in this case stems from the fact that he is extremely uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the old man, worried that he is constantly being ill-perceived. That being so, when he kills the old man, he believes that is able to “rid [him]self of the eye” (23) – and the judgement –
When the narrator confesses to the police, he is worried about the way they are perceiving him and what they are thinking of him. He believes the police to be mocking him as they sit around with him in the room where the old man’s body is hidden and converse: “[T]hey were making a mockery of my horror! […] Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” (25) To the narrator, a man who is obsessed with his image and the way he is viewed, the fact that he may be a subject of mockery is too much to bear. Being the subject of so many people’s scrutiny and observation renders the narrator extremely uncomfortable, even going so far as to admit his discomfort to the reader: “But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished [the police] gone.” (25) Furthermore, although the heartbeat the narrator hears at the end of the story might be thought to be his own due to fear that he has been found out, it is actually a manifestation of his nervousness and intense discomfort: “It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” (25) In sum, it is the narrator’s anxious mind and his self-consciousness that causes him to snap and confess to the murder.
Thus, the narrator in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart has problems with self-consciousness, which drives him to eventually kill the old man and to ultimately confess to the police. The psychological