Characters in "The Tell-Tale Heart"

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a first-person narration. It helps us to understand the main character better.
So the author is the main character of the story. He is nervous, paranoid and mentally ill. He doesn't know the difference between the "real" and the "unreal". He doesn't share his name, because he wants only to tell us what he had done. Or maybe he remembers that night when he committed a murder and tries to convince himself of being in his right mind.
But the reader can understand that he is crazy, based on his behavior, speech and thoughts. We can’t trust him, because he tries to show things in the most favourable light. We must draw conclusions ourselves.
However, he believed and believes that he is and was perfectly sane. He thinks that it is normally to kill someone, because something makes you feel uncomfortable and irritates you. He can’t even suppose that he is crazy and proves to us that he is in his right mind. Of course, we can assume that he is sane. But can a normal person say, that he felt pleasure in murder? I think, NO… But our narrator felt: "I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts."
He is a narrator and one of the characters at the same time. So we can say, that he is a dynamic character. There are given indirect (for example, how he watched the old man eight nights) and speech characteristics ("NERVOUS--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am!")

The next character is the old man. We can look at him through the eyes of the narrator. But, as it was mentioned, we can’t trust the main character. The old man had a blue eye, which irritated and scared the narrator: “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold…”. We can suppose that he was reach enough (the narrator showed the old man's "treasures" to the police), and he was afraid of robbers (“…for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers…”). But we can say, that he trusted the narrator, because he didn’t lock his bedroom’s door. The old man was incapable of defending himself: “His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself: "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney--it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions; but he had found all in vain.” He was in need of protection.

 

The three policemen don't really have any characteristics. But they play a major role in driving the plot of the narrator's story. The three policemen are fairly unambiguous, flat characters who do exactly what they are supposed to do.

The neighbor plays a small but important role in the narrator's story. Through the neighbor it is expressed narrator’s fear that someone can hear the perpetration of a crime.

The setting of the story

We can define two types of the setting of this story: physical and mental.
The physical settings are:

• the place, where now the narrator is (a prison or maybe an insane asylum);

• the house, the bedroom, where was committed a murder. There are only few details about this house in the story, which are directly given. We know that the old man kept his shutters tightly locked. And we can only imagine a bedroom, where the narrator killed the old man. This story taps our fears of the dark, and what the dark might hold. Reading this story, you look involuntarily around… Maybe someone also spies on you. 

The most important setting of this story is mental. It clearly explains the personality of the narrator. We can or try to understand the actions of the narrator, we know his feelings. It gives us more clear idea of the main character, of his essence.

The action in the narrator's story takes place over eight days.

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.

EDGAR ALLAN POE MYSTERY

The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849, has remained mysterious: the circumstances leading up to it are uncertain and the cause of death is disputed. In an analysis almost 147 years after his death, doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center believe that writer Edgar Allan Poe may have died as a result of rabies, not from complications of alcoholism. Poe's medical case was reviewed by R. Michael Benitez, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center. His review is published in the September 1996 issue of Maryland Medical Journal.

"No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death," says Dr. Benitez, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "But the historical accounts of Poe's condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies."

Poe was 40 years old when he died on October 7, 1849. He had traveled by train from Richmond, Virginia to Baltimore a few days earlier.

Poe was discovered lying unconscious on September 28 on a wooden plank outside Ryan's saloon on Lombard St. in Baltimore. He was taken to Washington College Hospital (now Church Hospital).

Historical accounts of his hospitalization indicate that at first he was delirious with tremors and hallucinations, then he slipped into a coma. He emerged from the coma, was calm and lucid, but then lapsed again into a delirious state, became combative, and required restraint. He died on his fourth day in the hospital. According to an account published in the Maryland Historical Magazine in December 1978, the Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel certified that the cause of Poe's death was "congestion of the brain."

"Poe's death is one of the most mysterious deaths in literary history, and it provided us with an interesting case in which to discuss many principles of medicine," says Dr. Mackowiak, who runs the weekly Clinical Pathologic Conference at the medical center.

Dr. Mackowiak agrees with Dr. Benitez that rabies was the most likely cause of Poe's death, based on the available evidence. Edgar Allan Poe is buried in a cemetery next to Westminister Hall at Fayette and Greene Streets, just one block from the University of Maryland Medical Center.

 
The material was taken from http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/news-releases-17.htm

Major Works

In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia" and "William Wilson." Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with 1841's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for "The Gold Bug," a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure.

 

Poe became a literary sensation in 1845 with the publication of the poem "The Raven." It is considered a great American literary work and one of the best of Poe's career. In the work, Poe explored some of his common themes—death and loss. An unknown narrator laments the demise of his great love Lenore. That same year, he found himself under attack for his stinging criticisms of his fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a plagiarist, and this written assault on Longfellow created a bit of backlash for Poe.

Continuing work in different forms, Poe examined his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including "The Philosophy of Composition," "The Poetic Principle" and "The Rationale of Verse." He also produced another thrilling tale, "The Cask of Amontillado," and poems such as "Ulalume" and "The Bells."

The material was taken from http://www.biography.com/people/edgar-allan-poe-9443160