On this particular night, unlike the preceding seven nights, the narrator's hand slipped on the clasp of the lantern, and the old man immediately 'sprang up in bed, crying out - 'Who's there?'' He can see nothing because the shutters are all closed. When he says 'I fairly chuckled at the idea,' we know that we are indeed dealing with a highly disturbed personality - despite the fact that he seems to present his story very coherently. On the eighth night, he decided it was now the time to commit the deed. It would sometimes take him an hour to go that far - 'would a madman have been so wise as this?' he asks, thus showing, he hopes, how thoroughly objective he can be while commenting on the horrible deed he committed.įor seven nights, he opened the door ever so cautiously, then when he was just inside, he opened his lantern just enough so that one small ray of light would cast its tiny ray upon 'the vulture eye.' The following morning, he would go into the old man's chamber and speak to him with cordiality and friendship. Every night at twelve o'clock, he would slowly open the door, 'oh so gently,' and would quietly and cunningly poke his head very slowly through the door. The story begins boldly and unexpectedly: 'I loved the old man,' the narrator says, adding, 'He had never wronged me.' Next, he reveals that he was obsessed with the old man's eye - 'the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it.' Without any real motivation, then, other than his psychotic obsession, he decides to take the old man's life.Įven though he knows that we, the readers, might consider him mad for this decision, yet he plans to prove his sanity by showing how 'wisely' and with what extreme precaution, foresight, and dissimulation he executed his deeds. Ironically, the narrator offers as proof of his sanity the calmness with which he can narrate the story.

His over-sensitivity becomes in this story the ultimate cause of his obsession with the old man's eye, which in turn causes him to murder the old man. His sensitivities allow him to hear and sense things in heaven, hell, and on earth that other people are not even aware of. This type is found throughout all of Poe's fiction, particularly in the over-wrought, hyper-sensitive Roderick Usher in 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' As with Usher, the narrator here believes that his nervousness has 'sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them.' Thus, he begins by stating that he is not mad, yet he will continue his story and will reveal not only that he is mad, but that he is terribly mad. The story begins with the narrator admitting that he is a 'very dreadfully nervous' type. And as noted in the introduction to this section, this story shows the narrator's attempt to rationalize his irrational behavior.

In a sense, the narrator is worse than a beast only a human being could so completely terrorize his victim before finally killing it, as, for example, the narrator deliberately terrorizes the old man before killing him. The story gains its intensity by the manner in which it portrays how the narrator stalks his victim - as though he were a beast of prey yet, at the same time, elevated by human intelligence to a higher level of human endeavor, Poe's 'murderer' is created into a type of grotesque anomaly. Even though this is one of Poe's shortest stories, it is nevertheless a profound and, at times, ambiguous investigation of a man's paranoia.

Terror by night book summary