Answer:
An unnamed person narrates Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He begins the story by informing the reader that he was and is terribly nervous, but he is not mad. He claims to have had a disease that sharpened all of his senses, but particularly his sense of hearing. He tells the reader that he will tell a story and that his ability to tell this story calmly is proof of his sanity.
Edgar Allan Poe never specifies if the narrator is a man or woman, but the person is generally assumed to be male.
The narrator describes how one day, inexplicably, he had the idea to kill an old man who lives with him. 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.
For a week, the narrator enters the old man’s room every night around midnight. 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. His eyes are always closed, however, and the narrator cannot bring himself to kill the man without the provoking gaze of the “vulture eye.”
On the eighth night, the old man wakes when the narrator opens the door. He cries out, asking who is there. 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. Finally, the narrator releases a ray of light from his lantern, and it falls on the eye that so frightens him.
The sound of a beating heart slowly begins to fill the narrator’s head. 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 beating becomes so loud that the narrator fears that the sound will wake the neighbors, and he knows he must kill the man. Finally, the beating slows and stops, and he knows the old man is dead.
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Fig. 1. The narrator hears a beating heart as he kills the old man and again later when the old man is already dead.
The narrator then describes dismembering the old man’s corpse in order to hide the body under the floor planks. When he has finished, the police arrive, alerted by the old man’s death cry.
The narrator, confident in his ability to conceal his crime, invites the officers in and shows them around the whole house, explaining that the old man is away in the country. However, as he takes them into the old man’s room, he begins to hear the dreaded sound of the beating heart.
The narrator is sure that the sound is the murdered man’s heart from below the floorboards, and he is also convinced that the police officers can hear it too. Driven into a panic, he confesses to the crime and reveals the location of the old man’s body.
The Tell-Tale Heart Themes
Some key themes in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" are madness, guilt, and time.
Step-by-step explanation: