THE TELL-TALE HEART

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849)

SUMMARYAn unnamed narrator opens the story by

addressing the reader and claiming that he is nervous but not mad. He says that he is going to tell a story in which he will defend his sanity yet confess to having killed an old man. A fear of the man’s pale blue eye is the reason of killing. Again, he insists that he is not crazy because his measured actions are not those of a madman. Every night, he went to the old man’s chamber. After a week of doing this, the narrator decides that the time is right to kill the old man.

On the eighth night, the old man wakes up and cries out. The narrator remains still. He knows how frightened the old man is. Soon, the narrator hears a dull pounding that he interprets as the old man’s heartbeat. Worried that a neighbor might hear the loud noise, he attacks and kills the old man. He then dismembers the body and hides the pieces below the floorboards in the bedroom. When he finishes his job, the narrator hears a knock at the street door. The police have arrived, having been called by a neighbour who heard the old man shriek.

The narrator is careful to appear normal. He leads the officers all over the house without acting suspiciously and even brings them into the old man’s bedroom to sit down and talk. The policemen do not suspect anything. The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear a low pounding sound. He recognizes the low sound as the heart of the old man coming from beneath the floorboards. He panics, believing that the policemen must also hear the sound and know his guilt. Very angry at the idea that they are mocking his agony, he confesses to the crime and shrieks at the men to rip up the floorboards.

SETTING

The story is set in a house occupied by the narrator and an old man.

The time of the events in the story is probably the early 1840's, when Poe wrote the story. The story covers a period of approximately eight days with most of the important action occurring each night around midnight.

The Narrator: He is an unnamed person who tries to convince the reader that he is not mad. Instead of pleading innocence, he tries to convince his listeners that he is sane. The narrator describes his careful planning and mastery at deceiving others, priding himself on his intelligence and the calculated nature of his crime and stating that a madman would not have acted as brilliantly as he had done, since "madmen know nothing."

CHARACTERS

POINT OF VIEWThe narration of the story is that of a

first-person unreliable narrator. The narrator is obviously deranged, readers learn during his telling of his tale, even though he declares at the outset that he is sane. The narrative is filtered through the narrator’s mind. We call the narrator unreliable because his telling of the story is twisted and his vision is distorted by his madness.

IRONYThe characterization of the narrator is ironical.

While he insists that he is sane, we know that he is indeed insane. A madman who is capable of logical reasoning and planning is also ironical.

All the time, the narrator thinks that the organ of sight, the Evil Eye, is so vexing; but in the end, a sound, the beating of the old man's heart, is what condemns the madman. The guarding against one danger while being overcome by another constitutes irony.