![]() I am quite aware that my drawing skills are more on the feeble side. The effect, however, is much the opposite.Have I decided to add cartoonist to my jack-of-the-arts-box? The story is a monologue in the first person delivered by the unnamed narrator as he attempts to convince the reader of his sanity. His anxiety and madness permeate the text, making it at times confusing or difficult to understand. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” informs us that he is very nervous right at the start of the story. Therefore, it's possible that the narrator is telling the story from a jail cell or another undisclosed location. The narrator describes the action in the past tense, ending with the confession of his crime. It is also important to note that the reader does not know where the narrator is as he tells the story. The house is located somewhere close enough to neighbors who can hear the old man cry out, but inside the home, the two characters seem to be completely isolated. The only room that is described is the old man’s bedroom, a very dark room entered through a door with creaky hinges. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is set in an old house where the narrator and old man apparently live. It reveals the old man’s terror and, later, the narrator’s guilt. The heart in “The Tell-Tale Heart” also reveals things it tells tales, so to speak. A heart generally symbolizes the essence of a person, perhaps their truest emotions or deepest desires. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the beating heart that the narrator hears is symbolic of his guilt. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant." Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. The narrator hears a beating heart as he kills the old man and again later when the old man is already dead. Finally, the beating slows and stops, and he knows the old man is dead.įig. The beating becomes so loud that the narrator fears that the sound will wake the neighbors, and he knows he must kill the man. He believes it is the old man’s heart that he hears, and he listens as it beats faster and faster, imagining the old man’s terror growing. The sound of a beating heart slowly begins to fill the narrator’s head. Finally, the narrator releases a ray of light from his lantern, and it falls on the eye that so frightens him. The narrator waits patiently until the man is quiet again, but he knows that the old man isn’t sleeping, that he is lying there in terror, trying to convince himself that the sound he heard was innocent. On the eighth night, the old man wakes when the narrator opens the door. His eyes are always closed, however, and the narrator cannot bring himself to kill the man without the provoking gaze of the “vulture eye.” He enters very slowly so as not to disturb the man and lets in a single ray of lantern light to see if the man’s eye is open. The old man has a bad eye that looks to the narrator like a vulture’s eye, and it disturbs him so much that he feels he must kill the man to rid himself of the horror of that gaze.įor a week, the narrator enters the old man’s room every night around midnight. ![]() ![]() The narrator describes how one day, inexplicably, he had the idea to kill an old man who lives with him. ![]() Edgar Allan Poe never specifies if the narrator is a man or woman, but the person is generally assumed to be male. ![]()
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