Edgar Allen Poe wrote what is now a very famous American short story in 1843. "The Tell-Tale Heart", narrated by the main character, told the story of this man murdering an older man. He explained that he was not a madman, and he claimed to not have anything against the man, except his eye. "He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it 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, and thus rid myself of the eye forever" (Poe 1). The main character explained his strategies for watching the man, treating him kindly, and, later, murdering him. He stalked around proudly as police officers came to investigate the scream, but he finally confessed as he believed to hear the pounding of the old man's heart thudding throughout the house.
Poe connects the romantic ideas of nature with those of the supernatural similarly in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven". In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the man believed that the old man's eye was evil because it looked like that of a vulture and wasn't like other people's eyes. He gave himself the responsibility to destroy the evil living amongst him. This connection of bird-like things with supernatural evil is found in both; the raven presented a symbol of evil to the man in "The Raven", while the old man's vulture-like eye was seen as a source of evil to be removed from existence.
Do the police officers ever actually hear the heart beating, or is it just the man's conscience?
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