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The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) Essay

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Introduction

Character analysis, plot summary, internal versus external forces, works cited.

The introductory part will present the The Tell- Tale heart (1843), by Alan Edgar Poe, introducing the main characters viz. the narrator and the old man. The story opens with the unknown narrator confessing he is restless but not harebrained or insane, as some would want to think.

He narrates his story by defending his sound mind although he has murdered an innocent old man. The narrator lives with the old man; however, he claims that his supposedly housemate has an evil blue eye that evokes fear in him (the narrator). At this point, the narrator is not trustworthy because he does not even understand himself; he does not know whether he is psychologically sick or he is just another murderer.

This section tackles the main characters of the story and as aforementioned, the narrator and the old man are the only central characters in the story. The narrator is untrustworthy, self-righteous and a rigid person who leaves no space for learning.

He believes he is sane despite the fact that he kills the old man for no apparent reason. His sanctimonious overtones infringe is trustworthiness. On the other hand, the old man is just a victim of malice or covered insanity.

The plot summary will outline the flow of the story where once more the narrator plays the central role. As the story opens, the narrator insinuates he is insane by declaring he has a story to tell; however, the story is a defense to guard his sanity. Therefore, the events of this section will focus on the narrator as he puts forward his claims of sanity.

However, to understand where all the sanity ‘noises’ are coming from, this section will flashback to the one event that seems to infringe the narrator’s insanity; the murder of the old man. Again, the narrator’s trustworthiness is compromised for by defending his actions, he unknowingly exposes his unreliability.

The overriding theme in this story is the theme of paranoia. As the story opens, the narrator acknowledges that he is nervous for reasons he does not know. The thin, almost confusing, or blurred line between paranoia and madness comes out clearly. People think paranoia is synonymous to madness and perhaps this explains why the narrator is vehement in defending his sanity.

Paranoia in this context also underscores the blurred line between hate and love according to Benfey (78). Ironically, many a time individuals hurt the closest people in their lives. In this section, the narrator is trustworthy; he loves and needs the old man, yet he kills him.

Ironically, the presence of police officers who come to investigate the murder of the old man does not evoke any uneasiness in the narrator. However, the deafening sounds of fear and guilt that haunt the narrator seem to take away his peace. The narrator does not confess the murder because the offices push him; no, he confesses because of guilt and self-conviction.

At this point, the story tries to emphasize that internal forces are stronger than external forces. One can defy and deny external forces like rule of law; however, defying self-conviction is tantamount to committing suicide and the narrator comes out as a trustworthy source of this scenario.

The concluding part of the essay will try to piece together the ideas raised in the story. Running from introduction, though plot summary to themes; this section will give a concise recap of the whole story.

Benfey, Christopher. “Poe and the Unreadable: ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.” New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales . United States: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Poe, Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, 1992. Web.

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The Tell-Tale Heart

37 pages • 1 hour read

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Discussion Questions

Why does the narrator commit murder according to them? What is your explanation for the crime?

If you had to represent the narrator in court, what kind of defense would you propose?

Why do you think the narrator kept hearing the heartbeat even after the old man’s death? Why does the story emphasize the heartbeat over any other element of the murder? Do you think it was otherworldly, a hallucination, or something else? Explain your reasoning.

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A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a Gothic novel in miniature. All of the elements of the Gothic novel are here: the subterranean secret, the Gothic space (scaled down from a full-blown castle to a single room), the gruesome crime – even the hovering between the supernatural and the psychological.

In just five pages, it’s as if Edgar Allan Poe has scaled down the eighteenth-century Gothic novel into a story of just a few thousand words. But what makes this story so unsettling?

Closer analysis reveals that ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ centres on that most troubling of things: the motiveless murder.

First, a brief summary of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. An unnamed narrator confesses that he has murdered an old man, apparently because of the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ which drove the narrator to kill him. He then describes how he crept into the old man’s bedroom while he slept and stabbed him, dragging the corpse away and dismembering it, so as to conceal his crime.

He goes to some lengths to cover up all trace of the murder – he even caught his victim’s blood in a tub, so that none was spilt anywhere – and then he takes up three of the floorboards of the chamber, and conceals his victim’s body underneath. But no sooner has he concealed the body than there’s a knock at the door: it’s the police, having been called out by a neighbour who heard a shriek during the night.

The narrator lets the police officers in to search the premises, and tells them a lie about the old man being away in the country. He keeps his calm while showing them around, until they go and sit down in the room below which the victim’s body is concealed.

The narrator and the police officers talk, but gradually the narrator begins to hear a ringing in his ears, a noise that becomes louder and more insistent. He believes that it is the beating of the dead man’s heart, taunting him from beyond the grave. Eventually, he can’t stand it any more, and tells the police to tear up the floorboards, the sound of the old man’s beating heart driving him to confess his crime.

The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is clearly unstable, as the end of the story reveals, but his mental state is questionable right from the start, as the jerky syntax of his narrative suggests:

True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The multiple dashes, the unusual syntactical arrangement, the exclamation and question marks: all suggest someone who is, at the very least, excitable. His repeated protestations that he is sane and merely subject to ‘over acuteness of the senses’ don’t fully convince: there is too much in his manner (to say nothing of his baseless murder of the old man) to suggest otherwise.

A motiveless crime?

And indeed, what makes ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ especially chilling – and here we might draw a parallel with another of Poe’s best-known tales, ‘The Black Cat’ – is that the killer freely confesses that his murder of the old man was a motiveless crime:

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees –  very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Murder is never justified, but it is sometimes understandable when a person has been driven to extremes and isn’t thinking clearly. But Poe’s narrator didn’t even kill the old man for something as cynical as financial gain. Even his proffered motive – the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ – is weak. He has to convince himself that that was why he did it, after the fact : ‘I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!’ (our emphasis).

One can imagine a police detective doing a double-take in the interview room. ‘You think it was his eye?’ This alone makes it clear that we are dealing with an unhinged mind, somebody who, to borrow from Bob Dylan, ‘killed for no reason’. Motiveless murderers are often the most unsettling.

Consider the ‘motiveless malignity’ of Iago , perhaps Shakespeare’s finest villain, who offers a number of potential motives for wanting to destroy the lives of Othello and Desdemona, and in doing so reveals that he very probably doesn’t have a real motive – other than wishing to cause trouble for the hell of it.

Poe and  Macbeth

But Othello is not Poe’s main Shakespearean intertext for ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Closer analysis of the story reveals that an important precursor-text to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, and probable influence on Poe, is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

Both texts centre on the murder of an ‘old man’; in both cases, the murderer is driven to feel guilt over his crime by being ‘haunted’ by his victim from beyond the grave (Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth , the old man’s beating heart in Poe’s story); both Macbeth and Poe’s narrator show signs of being at least a little mentally unstable; in both texts, the murder of the victim is followed by a knocking at the door.

But what makes Poe’s tale especially effective is the way he employs doubling to suggest that it is perfectly natural that the narrator should be paranoid about the sound coming from the floorboards. For before he had murdered the old man, the narrator had imagined his victim ‘trying to comfort himself’ when he heard a noise outside his bedroom:

All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.

But of course this is really the narrator projecting his own unease around sounds; and it thus foreshadows his later paranoia over the supposed sound coming from under the floorboards – the sound that will drive him to confess to his crime.

But along with the ‘motiveless’ nature of the narrator’s crime, the other aspect of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ which makes it such a powerful analysis of the nature of crime and guilt is the slight ambiguity hovering over that sound which taunts the narrator at the end of the story.

An ambiguous tale

It seems most likely that the sound exists only in his head, since the policemen are apparently oblivious to it as they continue to chat away calmly to the narrator. (This is the one real weak point in Poe’s story: once they’ve searched the premises they appear to hang around to make small talk with the narrator. Haven’t they got more important things to do? Unless the narrator isn’t as calm at this point as he believes, and they suspect foul play and are trying to get him to reveal something incriminating…)

But we cannot be entirely sure. Even if the sound is supernatural in origin – and Poe was obviously a master of the supernatural, as several of his other best stories attest – it may be that his victim is making his ghostly heartbeat heard only to the narrator, burrowing away deep within his mind.

But on balance we’re tempted to think that Poe, along with Dickens around the same time (compare the studied analysis of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit’s mind as he flees the scene), is pioneering a new kind of approach to the ‘ghost story’ here – one in which the ‘ghost’ is no more than a hallucination or phantom of the character’s mind.

Although such ambiguity had been used to good effect by Shakespeare, in the ghost story it is Poe, in such stories as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, who used this ambiguous plot detail to offer a deeper, more unsettling analysis of the nature of conscience.

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6 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”

Wonderful article! When I studied Poe in college my premise for one of my best papers centered on whether or not the murderer was sane or insane and even used “Methinks he protests too much” at the end. I believe I could’ve written several papers on this short story alone with several different topics. Again, wonderful article.

Thank you! Good Hamlet allusion too – one of the triumphs of Poe’s story, I think, is the instability of his narrator. Glad you enjoyed our analysis :)

Ahhhhh…and now here you have brought forth one of my most beloved tale tellers. Poe has influenced not only my own tales but my early life as well. Terrific analysis! The ambiguous nature of the conscience brought to fever pitch. :)

Thank you! It’s one of the real gems among Poe’s tales – and as you say, he’s a great tale-teller so there are quite a few to choose from :)

I’ve wondered if the heartbeat was the narrator’s own, since he was in a state of agitation and excitement while talking to the policemen. In any case, it’s a great story, and this is an interesting analysis.

• Pingback: A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ | Interesting Literature

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Poe's Short Stories

What is a good introduction for writing an essay about the tell tale heart by edgar allan poe.

intoduction

While many of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories are told by narrators who are relatively reliable, the first-person narrator of "The Tell Tale Heart" is completely insane, even though he tries to convince the reader that his careful planning and execution of the murder of his neighbor is completely sane.

It depends on what angle you're taking. I might take the essay backwards and begin with the narrator's arrest; tell the story in flashbacks from the narrators point of view in which we know he's insane, rather than the view where he's attwmotingf to prove he's not.

that would be attempting, sorry....

what is the best hook for A Tell-Tale Heart book?

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Tell-Tale Heart, Essay Example

Pages: 1

Words: 370

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“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe continues to remain one of the most fascinating and famous literary works in American history.  The chilling story truly represents the tales of a madman as he has clearly lost some semblance of sanity and is justified in killing an old man because of his ‘vulture’ eye.  The narrator may in fact be very unreliable in his retelling of the events that take place throughout the story.  His insanity may have altered how he truly viewed the world around him, especially with regards to the old man and his frightful eye.  It is clear that he does have enough sense about him to recall very finite details, which is something that an unreliable narrator would not be able to do.  Therefore, despite his insanity, the narrator helps the reader understand the true story of the events that took place surrounding the old man’s murder.

The beating heart in the story represents the narrator’s conscience and guilt that he feels for his actions against the old man.  The heart begins as a dull sound that just barely registers to the narrator, but then eventually escalates so loud and so painful that the narrator cannot take it anymore and confesses his actions.  It is not the actual sound of the heart that makes him confess, but the pounding of the narrator’s conscience and the weight of his actions upon his shoulders that forces him to do so.  For this reason, the climax of the story actually comes in the end.  This is the summation of all of the reader’s feelings for the narrator and the murder of the old man.  The pace of the story picks up during this scene and greatly heightens the emotions that the reader feels as the narrator fights with the sound of the beating heart.  Everything that happened throughout the story comes to a climactic finish as the narrator screams his confession to the police.  This was a perfect ending, and perfect climax for such a story and for this reason, among many others, the story still remains a major part of modern American literature.

Poe, Edgar A. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Literature.org – The Online Literature Library . Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://www.literature.org/authors/poe-edgar-allan/tell-tale-heart.html>.

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A Wanted Lesson Plan for “The Tell-Tale Heart”

• September 19, 2022

My very first Halloween lesson plan for “The Tell-Tale Heart” consisted of a reading-writing connection where students read the short story and participated in writing roulette, an activity where each student begins a story and group members continue it. Instead of candy, I gave them sticky glow-in-the-dark eyeballs , which looked especially cool when you threw them onto desks but ended up on the ceilings of other teachers’ classrooms. Needless to say, as much fun as they were, I ditched the eyeballs. I also changed the lesson as teachers sometimes do after reflecting. 

Both the story and writing roulette are engaging and I wanted to do something special for Halloween, but with all of the standards English teachers are required to cover, I wanted a lesson that not only engaged but hit the standards students needed to work on. That’s why I switched to a mock trial lesson with a short-answer question for assessment.

This lesson will cover everything from the hook to the closing activity, and as always, I’ll explain how to do this without you spending a penny, but if you’d like any of the handouts, visit Lesson Plan for “The Tell-Tale Heart” at my TPT store .

Before “The Tell-Tale Heart” Lesson

Begin by making copies, gathering costumes and props, and setting up your classroom. You don’t have to do everything I list. Do what you can; the students will still have fun with this lesson.

You’ll need copies of “The Tell-Tale Heart” that have room for annotations. Since this story is in the public domain, you can google and print it or visit commonlit.org . Just sign up for a free account to download the pdf.

I also like to create nameplates for the students. I type the following roles in the middle of separate sheets of paper so they can be folded like a nameplate (nothing fancy).

• Prosecuting Attorney
• Criminal Defendant (the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart”)
• Criminal Attorney (the narrator’s attorney)
• Courtroom Deputy Clerk
• Police officer
• Jury and Jury Foreman

Costumes and Props

Purchase these, search your closets, or borrow them from your theater arts teacher.

• Reading glasses and/or notepads for the attorneys and members of the jury (The dollar store carries these.)
• Lantern for the narrator
• Judge’s robe (My college graduation gown was black, so I used it for the judge’s robe.)
• Gavel for the judge
• Badge or tie for the clerk
• Ears for the neighbor (I had some elf ears from an old costume; obviously, any ears will work.)
• Badges for the police officers (The dollar store has these in their toy section.)

Courtroom Setup

Set up classroom desks or tables to look like a courtroom with seats for the judge, prosecution, defense, and testifying witness.

Opening “The Tell-Tale Heart” Lesson

I must admit that it excites me to be the person to introduce students to Edgar Allan Poe. Whether it’s when seventh graders study “Annabel Lee” or eighth graders study “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I find that I have the pleasure of this introduction because the majority of students have only heard of him if even that. 

My favorite way to introduce Poe is to gather students around me while I read a chapter on him from one of the following books. (I like both of these because they don’t read like an encyclopedia entry; instead, they give the interesting details, and they have pictures.)

How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous by Georgia Bragg and Kevin O’Malley

Lives of the Writers: Comedies, Tragedies (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull

If you don’t have these books, don’t worry because your school librarian may have a copy and your local library surely will. If not, I still have you covered because you can show a few minutes of the Tragic Life of Edgar Allan Poe at Biography on YouTube or browse the Poe Museum .

The Meat of “The Tell-Tale Heart” Lesson Plan

Students will be reading the story twice. For the first reading, have them annotate each paragraph with main idea hashtags while listening to one of these dramatic readings by Gubler or Danielson.

• Matthew Gray Gubler from Criminal Minds (15 minutes) (I love Reid!)
• G. M. Danielson (20 minutes)

Stop every few paragraphs to share hashtags and check for understanding. In a nutshell, main idea hashtags sum up what the paragraph is about in a creative way with just a few words. (You’ll notice that students are familiar with hashtags, so they come up with some good ones.) For the first paragraph of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I wrote #LoveMyEars since the narrator describes how incredible his hearing is.

Now, it’s time to choose the characters for the mock trial. Ask for volunteers to play the parts of the various characters from the story. (If you’re limited on time, consider leaving out some of the characters, like the judge, clerk, neighbor, and/or police officers.) Any student who doesn’t want to perform in front of the class can be a jury member.

When first reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” you know our narrator is mad and unreliable, but the students need to decide if he’s not guilty by reason of insanity according to the law. For this, because Virginia was the name of Poe’s wife and a place Poe spent much time in, I chose to refer to Virginia’s insanity law : 

To be found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI), it must be determined that because of the impairment the defendant. . .

• could not distinguish right from wrong,
• did not understand the nature, character, and consequences of the act, or
• was unable to stop or control the behavior. (Usually, any premeditation invalidates this claim.)

Share this information with students. Then have them reread the story aloud or independently while highlighting or underlining evidence that supports the following:

• Their role in the trial,
• evidence that proves/supports the insanity defense, and
• evidence that disproves the insanity defense. 

Students, especially the attorneys, will now need time to prepare. Allow them to work with partners or small groups to write statements to use during the trial:

• Opening statements (if you have time)
• Witnesses to be called and questions to ask them
• Closing statements (if you have time)
• What they will say if called to the stand to testify

Begin the mock trial, allowing students to use their notes as needed.

When all evidence has been presented, ask the jury to agree on a verdict and the judge to sentence the narrator accordingly. 

Assessing “The Tell-Tale Heart” Lesson

One way to assess students is with a short-answer question. I like these because I limit them to ten lines (unless they’re dying to write more, which they sometimes are), they’re easy to grade, they require textual evidence for support, and they help them learn about writing and developing body paragraphs.

For this lesson, I use “Is the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” not guilty by reason of insanity? Explain your answer and support it with evidence from the selection.” (You could also ask questions about theme, suspense, literary elements, and more.)

I share this simplified rubric with students. In my classroom, students earned a 100 for writing a 3, a 90 for a 2, a 70 for a 1, and a 60 for a 0. 

3–Insightful response that is thoroughly explained and supported with pertinent textual evidence

2–Sufficient response that is explained and supported with relevant textual evidence

1–Correct answer but limited explanation (no textual evidence and/or evidence does not support the response)

0–The answer is incorrect.

I also remind them to use APE to guide their responses (A = Answer, P = Proof, and E = Explanation). Students do not have to answer the question in this order, but I find that sharing this mnemonic with them helps them remember what to include when answering a short-answer question.

Closing “The Tell-Tale Heart” Lesson

Close the lesson by asking students to reflect on the lesson and/or their learning with questions such as these: 

• What was most challenging about this assignment? How did you respond to this challenge?
• What would your teacher say about the work you did today?
• What is one thing you would change about the assignment? What is one thing you’d keep the same?

That’s it! If your students complete every task I’ve written about, then this lesson will take about four forty-five-minute periods. However, you can shorten that considerably by hosting a debate instead of a trial, reading the story only once, and/or omitting the Poe introduction, the assessment, or the reflection.

Related Links for “The Tell-Tale Heart”

My Resources for “The Tell-Tale Heart” on TPT

Eleven Scary Stories of Gothic in Literature for High School English

“The Tell-Tale Heart” Lesson Plans, Summary, and Analysis

My Printable, Poe-Themed 2024 Calendar

Now, if you’re interested in having students edit their short-answer question (or any writing), visit my ninth blog: 

“Teaching Students to Edit a Little Every Day.”

Happy Halloween to you and your students! I hope every one of you enjoys this lesson plan for “The Tell-Tale Heart!”

Start teaching students how to use the comma with my free lessons, including anchor charts, warm-ups, and a slideshow with a corresponding booklet.

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