The plot of the story

Throughout Edgar Allan Poe’s life he was plagued with nightmares and the deaths of those he loved. Those nightmares and his tragic life were many times the basis for his stories and poems; often he found himself in the middle of those horrifying dreams and writings as the victim or antagonist.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe takes us to the mind of a mad man as he struggles with the thoughts that caused him to do the unthinkable.

This story is written in the first person narrative. This technique is used to get inside the main character's head and view his thoughts and are often exciting. A nameless person (the narrator ) explains that he is and was extremely nervous, but is not and was not insane. Rather, the narrator has a "disease" which makes all his senses, especially his hearing, very sensitive. To prove that he is of sound mind, he tells us the story on how he killed the old man while pleading his sanity, all his preparations and how cautious he was: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded--with what caution--with what foresight--with what dissimulation I went to work!”.  But why he did? He loved the old man and had nothing against him. Except…his horrible eye, “…a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. The narrator hated the eye and decided to kill the old man to be free of it. Every night, at almost 12am, the narrator came in the old man's bedroom and looked if the eye was open or not. The narrator did that for eight nights.

The climax of the story comes at night of the murder. The main character is describing all his actions and feelings in extremely precise way. On the eighth night the he killed the old man, he smothered the old man and then “…dismembered the corpse… took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings… replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye--not even his--could have detected anything wrong”.

 

The denoument is when three policemen came.The narrator was pretty calm. He gave them the guided tour of the house, and then invited to hang out with him in the man's bedroom. But, the narrator started to hear a terrible noise, which gets louder and louder. He thought that it was old man’s heartbeat and that everyone in that room heard it… But I think, it was heartbeat of the murderer. Somewhere deep in his mind he understood what he had done. To stop that noise, which drove him mad, the narrator told the cops to look under the floorboards and confessed to murder.