Tell Tale Heart Review
Tell Tale Heart Summary/Analysis.
We open to a dark room. We cannot tell exactly where, only that its dark and inside a room. The narrator opens with admitting they are not mad, that in fact “the disease” had sharpened their senses. The story gets more suspenseful as he describes how he stalks his victim. Trying to portray himself as the victim, all the while he makes himself out to sound like the hunter.
He tells us how he is not mad (though through description and constant insisting, only makes himself to sound even more mad) and has senses so acute, that he can hear things from heaven and hell. It seems this “heightened awareness” finds a focal point when he begins to describe “the old mans eye”. He becomes obsessed with it describing it as a pale blue, with film over it, and like that of a vulture. With our any logical provocation, he decides to kill the old man.
For seven nights he stalks the old man at night (in my opinion overcautiously) opening the door just enough each time to poke his head in and then opening his lantern just enough to allow a thin ray of light to shine on the closed vulture eye. On the eighth night he decides to kill the old man. This time after poking his head in the pitch black room, his hand slips of the clasp waking the old man who cries out “whos there?” Though since its still dark the narrator remains quiet for over an hour waiting for the old man to go back to bed. The narrator claims he can start to hear the sounds of a heart beating loudly, (though it is unclear whose heart we hear). After an hour he opens the lantern to let through a ray of light, this time it falls upon an open vulture eye. He claims to hear the old mans heart beat louder and louder until he fears the neighbors might hear it. The old man yells out so the narrator drags the old man to the floor and smothers