THE TELL TALE HEART

True!-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am

We begin the story with the ravings of a mysterious man whose insistence on the fact that he is not insane only tells us that he is

We know little of this shadowy protagonist, other than the fact that he seems insane. He begins his story with an unknown obsession. We later learn that the cause of this obsession is an old man who he apparently lives with. The unnamed old man has a blind and clouded eye, which disgusts and horrifies the protagonist. He decides to rid himself forever of this terrible eye by killing the old man.

I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
The protagonist then spends the nights of the next week watching the eye through the bedroom door with the smallest beam of light from a shuttered lantern as the man slept. He could not kill the man when his eye was closed, because he did not hate the old man but his eye. On the eighth night, as he stood watch over the man, he chuckled at the thought of his own brilliance and how unnoticeably he watched the man every night. The old man heard him and woke

up. He was scared but could not place the sound he heard. Slowly and discreetly, the killer opened the lantern, until a tiny beam fell upon the blind eye, wide open. The man stood staring at the hideous thing, frozen and furious. He then began to hear it, a faint noise, a rapid noisethe beating of a terrified heart. It grew louder and louder; fearing that it would be heard by a neighbor, the man decided it was time. With a yell, he burst into the room, threw the man to the floor, and suffocated him with his own bed.

There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.
To hide the body, he cut off the head and limbs, doing so over a tub to be sure that no blood fell on the floor. He hid the remains underneath the floor boards, removing them with such care that no one could see that they have been removed. In the morning, the police visited the house, explaining that a neighbor had heard a shout the night before. The man was at ease, since he had gotten rid of the old man; he no longer had any eye to fear. He explained to the police that the shout came from his nightmares. The old man, he said, was away in the country. He invited the officers into the home, taking them into the room in which he had killed the old man. Here he decided that they would have their refreshments, placing his

own chair upon the makeshift grave of the old man. After a while, he began to hear a noisea faint, rapid noise. He realized, in horror, what the noise was. He began to talk louder, to drown out the noise that the police apparently could not hear, but it grew louder and louder, and with it his fear grew. But why where the guests talking cheerfully as if nothing was wrong? They knew. It was the only conclusion he could come to. They knew, and they where mocking him. His terror grew, as did the sound of the heart,

Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -tear up the plankshere, here!- it is

the beating of his

hideous

heart!

References Poe, Edgar Allan. Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1989.