The Tell Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe

About the author
• Edgar Allan Poe born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849)
was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best
known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of
mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of
Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was
one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and
considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as
a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.[1]
Poe is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through
writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.[2]
 •Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth
"Eliza" Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother
died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of
Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them

Early Life well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left
after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with John Allan over the
funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in
the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first
collection Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe
and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's
wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a
firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan.
Death
• Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working
for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of
literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities,
including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married
his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847.
In January 1845, Poe published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. He
planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The
Stylus), but before it could be produced, he died in Baltimore on October 7,
1849, at age 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death
remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes
including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.
• Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as
specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his
work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films,
and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today.
The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as
the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.
 • One of the most discussed and
imaginative cartoons of any era. It
tells the famous Edgar Allan Poe
Summary of story of the deranged boarder who
had to kill his landlord, not for
The Tell Tale greed, but because he possessed
Heart an "evil eye." The killer is never
seen but his presence is felt by the
use light-and-shadow to give the
impression of impending disaster.
• The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It follows an
unnamed, unreliable narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a
"vulture eye". The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by cutting
it into pieces and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests
itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards.
• It is unclear what relationship, if any, the old man and his murderer share. It has been
suggested that the old man is a father figure or, perhaps, that his vulture eye represents
some sort of veiled secret. The ambiguity and lack of details about the two main characters
stand in stark contrast to the specific plot details leading up to the murder.

• The story was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843. The Tell-
Tale Heart is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and one of Poe's most
famous short stories. It has been adapted or served as an inspiration for a variety of media.
Character Summaries

The narrator
The unnamed, unreliable narrator kills the old man because he can't
stand the old man's vulture eye. He spends the entire story trying to
persuade us that he is in fact completely sane.

The old man

The old man is murdered by the narrator because of his strange, vulture-
like eye. He is then chopped up and hidden under the floorboards, but
the phantom beating of his heart causes the narrator to go mad and
reveal his crime to the police.
Plot Summary
• The unnamed narrator begins by explaining that yes, they have been
sick recently, but that they are not mad. They claim that the illness
actually benefited them by making their hearing better.

• The narrator then goes on to relate some past events involving an old
man, events that he claims even prove his sanity. He says that at first
he didn’t hate the old man, that they even loved him, because the
old man had done nothing to them.
• They did mention that the old man had a strange, vulture-like eye, and that the
old man’s eye gave the narrator a strange, cold feeling when he looked at them.
It got worse and worse to the point where the unnamed narrator decided that
the only thing to do was to kill the old man so the vulture eye could never look at
them again.

• The unnamed narrator continues to explain that they are not mad – a mad
person could not plan a murder, after all! They then detail how every day the
next week they were friendly to the man, and at night they crept into his room.
For seven days though they were unable to kill the man because he had his eyes
closed – it was the vulture eye that was compelling the unnamed narrator to kill
the old man, after all.
• It is on the eight night that the old man wakes up when the narrator enters the
room. The old man knows that someone is there, and he even cries out with fear.
The narrator can finally see the awful vulture eye, and it is this that finally
enables him to murder the man.
• The narrator says that the illness had strengthened his hearing to the point
where he could hear the old man’s heart beating in his chest. The sound grew
louder and louder as he stood there looking at the man, and then louder still as
he murdered him, until it was gone.
• After murdering the man, the unnamed narrator chopped up his body and put
him under the floorboards. The next day, three police officers came to visit the
narrator because a neighbour had tipped them off to a strange sound coming
from the old man’s house.
The heart proved to be
the narrator’s undoing.
• The narrator explains that he invited the
policemen in, confident in his success.
Suddenly, though, he began to hear the
beating of the old man’s heart under the
floorboards. He thought the policemen
were playing a joke on him when they
said they couldn’t hear it, and the
beating of the heart got worse and
worse until the narrator was compelled
to reveal his crime.
The narrator revealed the dead man’s body to
the police.
Sketch the character of the narrator in the
story “ A Tell Tale Heart “
• Like many of Poe’s other main characters, the narrator of “The Tell-
Tale Heart” is unreliable. The narrative unfolds as he confesses his
crimes to an unknown third party (and by extension, the readers).
Rather than being concerned with his crimes or the consequences of
his actions, the narrator is obsessed with proving his sanity. He uses
evidence of the systematic precision with which he carried out the
murder. However, these overly meticulous actions ironically prove his
insanity rather than his sanity. The narrator claims that he suffers
from “nervousness” that causes an “over-acuteness of the senses.”
This is the only explanation he gives for his motives and obsession
with the old man’s eye.
• Our narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart is such a wreck, it's hard not to feel sorry for him.
He's nervous ("very dreadfully nervous"), paranoid, and physically and mentally ill.
He doesn't know the difference between the "real" and the "unreal," and seems to
be completely alone and friendless in the world. We suspect that he rarely sleeps.
• He's also a murderer.

Maybe this explains why he doesn't share his name, or any other identifying
characteristics. He wants us to know what he did, but not where to find him.
We actually have precious little to go on in discussing his character, and we
have to do lots of investigation and reading between the lines to come up with
possibilities.
Sketch the character of the old man in the
story “ A Tell Tale Heart “
• Old Man: The old man has a clouded, pale, blue eye, which is the only
thing that the narrator describes about his appearance. The narrator
claims that he loved the old man, but it is unclear what the
relationship is between them. The narrator mentions that the old man
has “gold” but does not indicate that he works for the old man. He
might be a tenant in the old man’s house or both men had rented
rooms in a boardinghouse; he might be some kind of caretaker. There
is evidence for and speculation about all types of relationships
between the two characters, but it is important to note that the
narrator keeps their relationship a mystery; he reduces the old man to
nothing more than his eye.
What are the major themes of the story “ A
Tell Tale Heart “ ?
1.Versions of Reality

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" disrupts our versions of reality,
even as we identify with it in ways we might not want to admit.
Something sparks our curiosity and forces us to follow the narrator
through the chilling maze of his mind. We hear the story of murder
through words, and through his version of reality.
2.Cunning and Cleverness

• The main character of "The Tell-Tale Heart" promises us a tale of

cunning and cleverness, and delivers. At the onset, we doubt the
cleverness; maybe we even feel cleverer than the narrator. But as
Edgar Allan Poe's ten-paragraph masterpiece unfolds, we find we are
caught in the story's web, just as the characters are.
3.Mortality
The Tell-Heart" is a murder mystery, the kind where we know who the killer is
(sort of), but can't really understand his motives. This story deals with the fear of
death, with dying, and the question of how a person can kill another. As such,
Edgar Allan Poe's story is suffused with an underlying sadness, and a sense of
mourning.
4. Time :
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is obsessed with time: it's jammed with references to time
and clocks. The time structure seems fairly straightforward at first, but, through
all the aforementioned references, it succeeds in confusing and eluding us. Some
questions of time in the story are never answered, contributing to the confusion.
• 5. The Home
• Edgar Allan Poe makes a mockery of the shopworn phrase "home is
where the heart is" in "The Tell-Tale Heart," expressing some deep
anxieties toward the very idea of "home" (as in the place one hangs
one's hat) and "home," (as in the larger community). Here home (in
both senses) is a place of violence, death, disease, anguish, and
isolation. It's also a place where mysterious hearts tell tales in the
night, grim tales, of home gone bad.
What is the significance of the title “ A Tell
Tale Heart “ ?
• At the most obvious level, the title refers to the beating of the old
man's heart. The heart "tells tales" to the narrator. Tales, as you well
know, are stories, and can be based on either real or imagined events.
In either case, tellers of tales want to keep the reader or listener
paying attention, and will often resort to extreme exaggerations to
achieve that goal.

So, what tales does the old man's heart tell? We first hear his heart
beating on the eighth night, when he realizes that something is not
right in his room. His heart tells a tale of fear, which in turn makes the
narrator extremely angry and gives him the push he needs to carry out
his dastardly deed.
• The next time we hear the beating of the heart is after the old man is
dead. See, this is part of why the narrator tells us he cut up the body
before burying it under the floorboards. If it wasn't for that step, we
could imagine that the old man maybe wasn't quite as dead as the
narrator thought. Since that isn't a possibility, and since we know that
dead hearts don't beat, the narrator's own hidden guilt over the deed
is projected onto the dead man's heart, thus telling a tale of the
narrator's guilty feelings.
• So, the title also refers to the narrator's heart. Inside the heart is
where our deepest, truest feelings and emotions live, at least
metaphorically speaking. We could look at the whole story of the old
man's murder as a tale told by the narrator, a tale from his own heart.
The title refers to both the narrator's heart, and to the old man's
heart, and to the tales told by both.
References
• 1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046408/plotsummary
• 2.
https://wikisummaries.org/the-tell-tale-heart/#:~:text=The%20Tell%2
DTale%20Heart%20is,with%20a%20%22vulture%20eye%22
.
• 3.
https://www.owleyes.org/text/tell-tale-heart/analysis/character-anal
ysis
• 4.
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tell-tale-heart/anal
ysis/title