“The Tell-Tale Heart” – by Edgar Allan Poe

Author  Background:

Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It is told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of his sanity, while describing a murder he committed. (The victim was an old man with a filmy "vulture-eye", as the narrator calls it.) The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by dismembering it and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the form of the sound—possibly hallucinatory—of the old man's heart still beating under the floorboards.

Character List: 

1)    The Unnamed Narrator

2)    The Old Man

3)    The Neighbor

4)    The Three Policemen

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 1840s, 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.

Main point of view:

The 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.

In short,  An 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 neighbor  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 narrators 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.