Anthony Marra, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (McSweeney’s 49)
Anthony Marra’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” follows closely Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” all within the spirit of McSweeney’s 49’s cover stories theme.
A man confesses before a judge how he murdered his
roommate, Richard. He does it, he says, to prove that he is not insane and thus
deny the claim his own defense attorney is making.
He had been spying on his roommate, who had been taking
pictures of himself in the bathroom for Tinder. The narrator had become more
intrusive each night—and added a kitchen knife behind his back the final night.
When he thinks Richard spotted him and took a picture of him, he lunges at
Richard, stabs him to death, cleans everything up, and “pried open the living
floorboards and entombed him within the dusty cavity” (p. 74).
Using the phone as the thumping heart was clever, but the strength
of the story lies in the narrator’s voice—which doesn’t mean it’s a likable
voice. It’s not. Hints of psychological turmoil bubble up frequently in the person’s
nonstop monologue, which reads like a maniacal, caffeinated version of Socrates’s
speech at his trial, as captured by Plato’s Apology.
This quote about life mediated by social media is well put:
“Every experience he dutifully engraved via tweet, post, or status in the
marbled memory of the cloud. Reality was only visible to Richard at 326 ppi”
(p. 73).
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