I seriously doubt that Edgar Allan Poe based any of the
events of "The Tell-Tale Heart" on his own personal experiences. Poe may have had his
mental demons, but he was apparently never involved in any murder scheme. Some critics
believe that the story evolved from Poe's own "unbalanced" mental
state.
His
literary executor, R. W. Griswold, wrote a libelous obituary in the New York
Tribune vilifying him as mentally depraved. Even as late as 1924, critic
Alfred C. Ward, writing about ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ in Aspects of the Modern
Short Story: English and American argued that Poe ‘‘had ever before him the
aberrations of his own troubled mind—doubtfully poised at all times, perhaps, and almost
certainly subject to more or less frequent periods of disorder: consequently, it was
probably more nearly normal, for him, to picture the abnormal than to depict the
average.’’
Most critics
disagree with the above comments, however, and declare that Poe had none of the unstable
characteristics shown by his most famous creations. One critic did see a connection
between his two characters (Fortunato and Montresor) in "The Cask of
Amontillado."
The Poe biographer William Bittner claims that
the two characters in the story "are two sides of the same man Edgar Poe as he saw
himself while
drinking.’’
Most likely, as
other critics have pointed out, ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ was "basically self-explanatory"
or a ‘‘tale of conscience."
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