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“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allen Poe and published in 1843. Representative of Poe’s trademark macabre style, the story is narrated in the first-person by an unnamed man who attempts to convince the reader of his sanity after committing a murder. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is considered a classic of Gothic literature and remains one of Poe’s most famous tales of suspense.
The narrator begins by insisting that, while he is terribly nervous from the ordeal he is about to relate, he is not mad. Instead, his senses have been sharpened by the experience, and he explains that he will calmly tell us the “whole story” to prove his point.
The narrator describes an old man whose eye he begins to fear and detest. Although the narrator’s relationship to this old man remains mysterious, he notes that he did not desire the old man’s money, nor had he ever been wronged by the man and in fact felt affection for him. Nevertheless, the narrator decides to kill the old timer so that he will never again have to look upon the pale and filmy eye.
Each night around midnight, the narrator sneaks into the old man’s room and cautiously shines a lantern onto his eye, insisting in the retelling that a madman would never have been as wise and careful as this. However, because the old man’s eye is always closed, the narrator cannot summon the visceral distaste that he needs to kill him.
On the eighth night, the narrator’s thumb slips on the lantern’s fastening, and the noise wakes the old man, who cries out in terror. For an hour, the narrator and the old man remain frozen in place.
Eventually, the narrator decides to slowly shine the lantern on the man’s vulture eye, now wide open. The sight of the eye triggers the hatred he’d been missing the last seven nights. He begins to hear the old man’s heartbeat, which he compares to the sound of a watch enveloped in cotton.
As the heartbeat grows louder, the narrator worries that the beating will wake the neighbors. He attacks, dragging the old man to the floor and stifling him with the mattress until he can no longer hear the beating.
The narrator dismembers the old man’s corpse and conceals it beneath the floorboards, describing the “wise precautions” he takes in doing so. He adds that not a spot of blood stains the floorboards by the time he is done, as he cleverly collected it using a tub.
Three policemen knock at the door around four o’clock in the morning. They have come to check on the house, having been summoned by a neighbor who heard a shriek. The narrator invites the policemen in and confidently assures them that nothing is wrong, even brazenly inviting them to sit down directly above the old man’s corpse.
However, just as the policemen seem utterly assured of his innocence, the narrator begins to hear a familiar sound: that of a watch enveloped in cotton. He realizes it is the old man’s heart and becomes increasingly agitated, eventually growing convinced that the policemen can hear it too. Finally, the narrator cries out, admitting to the murder.