Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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“The Tell-Tale Heart,” tells the story of a madman who murders his elderly neighbor. The Reason behind this callous crime being the extreme discomfort brought to the narrator by his neighbor’s eye. The narrator/murderer, describes the neighbor’s eye as “a vulture, pale blue…with a film over it,” and claims this eye possesses him. With his mind in a craze, the narrator’s feelings toward the old man change, causing him to act irrationally and shaping the whole story. Early in the story, the man admits that he, “loves the old man and has nothing against him," except for his abnormal eye. In order to free himself from the intimidating eye, the man plans to kill his neighbor. He comes up with a plan and stays awake for several nights to watch his neighbor sleep, but “always the eye was closed, so it was impossible for me to do the work. For me it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye,” he says. Each day, the old man carried on, unharmed and unaware that he had been stalked the previous night or that there is a problem between …show more content…

The narrator says, “my anger increased as it looked straight at me. I could not see the old man’s face. Only that eye, that hard blue eye, and the blood in my body became like ice.” He says he could hear the old man’s heart beat, like the ticking of a clock as he sat up in terror. Hearing this low thump, along with the prior irritation from the eye, sets him in furor. The narrator leaps in his neighbor’s room and attacks him. He sits on top of him and suffocates him with a pillow. The narrator then explains how he “dismembered the corpse...cut off the head and the arms and the legs," then scattered them beneath the floorboard. The madman rejoices in the old man’s death, and his so called “perfect” plan, for now, all his troubles where