The treacherous heart
The tell-tale heart (also: Das schwatzende Herz or The old man with the vulture eye , English original title: The Tell-Tale Heart ; first published in The Pioneer , 1843) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe . It is about the murder of the first-person narrator of an old man. The story is a classic of horror literature .
content
The first-person narrator wants to prove to the listener with his report that he has irritable nerves and his senses sharpened by his suffering ("I heard everything that happened in heaven and on earth; also some things that happened in hell."), but that he is by no means insane. Apparently he is being accused of that; maybe in a police interrogation or in a psychiatric investigation. Because he killed an old man, but not out of hatred or greed. He says that he loved the old man and that he didn't touch his money. The crime was triggered solely by a physical peculiarity of the old man: one of his eyes, pale blue, was covered by a thin membrane and resembled that of a vulture. He couldn't look at it without being gripped by deadly hatred. In the following he describes precisely the course of the crime and thus exposes his psychosis himself :
The first-person narrator postpones the act for a week. During the day of this week he meets the old man with particular kindness. But at night, when he sleeps, he looks for him so quietly and carefully that he does not notice it. Then he opens a previously blinded lantern a crack and shines it in his face. However, because the eye remains closed, he cannot kill him.
On the night of the murder, the narrator gives himself away with a noise. The old man is startled. The lurking perpetrator freezes in complete silence in absolute darkness. But he suspects that the frightened man feels his presence. The two watch each other for an hour. The narrator imagines with relish the victim's panic, which he knows well himself. Finally he opens his dazzling lantern a crack. The light falls on the hated eye. But he still can't get himself to act until he hears the old man's heart begin to beat louder and louder. He's afraid the neighbors could hear the knocking. With a scream, he leaps at the old man, suffocates him under his bedclothes, but hears his victim's heart beating for a long time.
The narrator also considers the way in which he hides the dead person to be proof of his clear mind. He dismantles the body, removes floorboards from the floor of the room, stuffs the body parts into the cavity underneath and closes the gap again with perfect craftsmanship. He told the police officers, who were alerted by a neighbor who heard the scream, with a calm smile that he himself had expelled him in a dream. The old man had gone to the country. The investigators see that the money has not been touched and find no trace of violence. Her suspicions are dispelled and the narrator invites her in his high-spirited feeling of security to a chat on the scene. But a noise begins in his ear that increases to an increasingly louder throbbing, and he is convinced that the visitors also know the meaning of the noise, but they make fun of it by hypocritically ignoring it. In order to free himself from his unbearable agony, the narrator confesses the deed by screaming that the terrible knocking is the heart of the victim and that it is under the floorboards.
interpretation
The narrative is a paradigm (prime example) of suspense in literature: the reader knows from the start that the first-person narrator will kill the old man. All the tension is on how. With his constant assertions that he is completely sensible, the first-person narrator only gets the reader to believe that he is completely insane. The goal of killing a person for just a small physical abnormality is so irrational that even the most purposeful pursuit becomes irrational. Poe proves to be a master of secrecy: He never reveals a word about the actual relationship between the perpetrator and his victim. But where does a younger man live so closely with an older man as these two? The association that this is a conflict between son and father is by no means far-fetched. She is supported by Marie Bonaparte , for whom Poe works off the hatred of his foster father John Allan in this story, who lovingly raised little Edgar and then pushed the adult heartlessly into poverty and misery. The need to love and hate at the same time in the double-bind situation is expressed in this text , along with the violence that promotes the development of schizophrenia :
"I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him although I chuckled at heart."
"I knew what the old man was feeling and regretted him, even though my heart chuckled with pleasure."
With the killing, the first-person narrator serves his hatred, but his love makes the victim's heart beat again and forces the confessed perpetrator to confess.
According to Klaus Zobel, almost all commentators on the text are mistaken that it is a crime story. One overlooks the monological conception of the text. Enclosed in the circle of a completely idiosyncratic solipsistic conception and view of his world, the first-person narrator no longer succeeds in separating what is excessively imagined from what actually exists. Poe creates a nocturnal phantasmagoria in which the traits of a crime story, which at first seemed very realistic, dissolve more and more into a game of puzzles in which it is no longer possible to differentiate between victim and perpetrator. The narrative process, which apparently reflects reality, turns out to be a series of delusional ideas and images that pull the first-person narrator into ever greater psychotic confusion.
Influences
Poe probably used Charles Dickens ' 1840 story The Clock-Case: A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second (see #Weblinks ); some passages in Poe's short story show similarities with Dickens' work. References to ETA Hoffmann's The Elixirs of the Devil and Das Fräulein von Scuderi can also be seen. Poe's most important source, however, is likely to have been the episode A Madman's Manuscript from the eleventh chapter of the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, as Klaus Zobel conclusively demonstrates, while The Clock Case could only have been of secondary importance for Poe.
German translations (selection)
- 1861: unknown translator: the accusing heart. Scheible, Stuttgart.
- approx. 1890: Alfred Mürenberg : The treacherous heart. Spemann, Stuttgart.
- 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : The treacherous heart. JCC Bruns, Minden.
- 1909: Gisela Etzel : The babbling heart. Propylaen Verlag, Munich.
- 1912: unknown translator: The treacherous heart. Kiepenheuer, Weimar.
- 1922: Joachim von der Goltz : The treacherous heart. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
- 1923: Wilhelm Cremer : The old man with the vulture eye. Verlag der Schiller-Buchhandlung, Berlin.
- ca.1925 : Bernhard Bernson : The treacherous heart. Josef Singer Verlag, Strasbourg.
- 1945: Marlies Wettstein : The treacherous heart. Artemis, Zurich.
- 1953: Richard Mummendey : The Treasonous Heart. Hundt, Hattingen.
- 1955: Arthur Seiffart : The treacherous heart. Tauchnitz Verlag, Stuttgart.
- 1966: Hans Wollschläger : The treacherous heart. Walter Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.
- 1989: Thekla Zachrau : The treacherous heart. Reclams Universal Library, Stuttgart.
- 2018: Steffen Jacobs : The treacherous heart. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne.
Others
- The story was set to music with the original title The Tell-Tale Heart on the Alan Parsons Project's album Tales of Mystery and Imagination .
- Stephen Hillenburg , the inventor of SpongeBob SquarePants , adapted the tale in the episode Squeaky Shoes .
- In the Simpsons episode, Lisa's rival , Allison builds a diorama of history for a school competition.
- The composer Bruno Coli set the original text to music in his opera The Tell-Tale Heart in 2004 .
- In the horror cabinet episode 127, radio play director Marc Gruppe linked Das verräterische Herz in September 2017 with the short story The facts in the Valdemar case , also by Poe , by letting Ernest Valdemar (voiced by Rolf Berg ) confess the act on his deathbed.
- Bob Dylan mentions The Tell-Tale Heart in the lyrics of his song I Contain Multitudes , the opening track of his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways
literature
- H. Bodden, H. Kaußen: Great American Short Stories · Model Interpretations. 2nd rev. Edition. Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-577130-7 , pp. 82-92.
Web links
- Translation ( memento of April 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) by Hedda Eulenberg
- The chattering heart at Zeno.org . Translation: Gisela Etzel
- The clock case. A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second , in Charles Dickens: Master Humphrey's Clock
- The Madman's Manuscript . in Charles Dickens: s: en: The Pickwick Papers / Chapter 11
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Klaus Zobel: Texts and Interpretations . Northeim 2008. pp. 147-198. Excerpt from Drei-a-Verlag.de
- ↑ See comments on the short story in the Haffmans Werkausgabe Volume 3, 1994, p. 612.
- ↑ The record hodgepodge . In: Popshot . September 2017 ( over-blog.de [accessed on October 5, 2017] with inter alia Horror Cabinet 127 and Jhene Aiko).