The Tell-Tale Heart Plot Analysis

Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation,
conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers
sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.

Initial Situation
Not insane! and the "Evil Eye"
The narrator wants to show that he is not insane, and offers a story as proof. In that
story, the initial situation is the narrator's decision to kill the old man so that the man's
eye will stop looking at the narrator.

Conflict
Open your eye!
The narrator goes to the old man's room every night for a week, ready to do the dirty
deed. But, the sleeping man won't open his eye. Since the eye, not the man, is the
problem, the narrator can't kill him if the offending eye isn't open.

Complication
The narrator makes a noise while spying on the old man, and the
man wakes up and opens his eye.
This isn't much of a complication. The man has to wake up in order for the narrator to
kill him. If the man still wouldn't wake up after months and months of the narrator
trying to kill him, now that would be a conflict.

Climax
Murder
The narrator kills the old man with his own bed and then cuts up the body and hides it
under the bedroom floor.

Suspense

Uh-oh, the police.

The narrator is pretty calm and collected when the police first show up. He gives them
the guided tour of the house, and then invites them to hang out with him in the man's
bedroom. But, the narrator starts to hear a terrible noise, which gets louder and louder,
and

Denouement
Make it stop, please!
Well, the noise gets even louder, and keeps on getting louder until the narrator can't
take it anymore. Thinking it might make the noise stop, the narrator tells the cops to
look under the floorboards.

Conclusion
The narrator identifies the source of the sound.
Up to this moment, the narrator doesn't identify the sound. It's described first as "a
ringing," and then as "a low, dull, quick sound much such a sound as a watch makes
when enveloped in cotton" (9). Only in the very last line does the narrator conclude
that the sound was "the beating of [the man's] hideous heart!" (10)

The Old Man's Eye

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
The old man's eye is blue with a "film" or "veil" covering it. This could be a medical
condition, like a corneal ulcer, but symbolically it means that the characters have
issues with their "inner vision" what's commonly known as one's outlook on the
world. They are stuck. Everything is obscured for them. Our reading of the story is
likewise filtered through this hazy eye, causing at least some confusion and frustration
with the text.
The eye also does some pretty weird stuff. It seems dull and unseeing yet, it has
strange powers. It makes the narrator's blood run cold. It "chill[s] the very marrow in
[his] bones" (6). After hiding the old man's body, the narrator "replaced the boards so
cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye not even his [the old man's] could have
detected any thing wrong" (8). Interesting. That statement implies that at some point
the eye could see hidden or secret things.
The eye also seems to have a bodyguard, the heart. When the narrator trains the beam
on the open eye, it causes the heart to beat an alert. When the policemen are there, the

heart beats loudly to alert the cops so the eye can again see and be seen.
The narrator is fixated on the "vulture eye" aspect of the old man's eye. He brings it
up three times. Vultures prey on the sick or dead, and they gorge themselves to the
point of stupor. Whether or not the old man is a vulture-like person, we can't know.
But that's what he symbolizes to the narrator. If vultures prey on the dead and almost
dead, and the narrator is afraid of the "vulture eye," does this mean the narrator is
dead or almost dead?

Stylistically, Poe can be quite maddening, even as we marvel at the precision and at
the tightly packed, exquisitely worded, yet curiously rough sentences each open to
hours of debate.
Within the ten-paragraph frame of "A Tell-Tale Heart" we see many groups of short
sentences, like this: "Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old
man" (1). A web of complications spun from just thirteen words.
We also see longer sentences like this: "So I opened it you cannot imagine how
stealthily, stealthily until, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider,
shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye" (6).
Notice how the longer sentence is actually less ambiguous and frustrating than the
very short ones. The long sentence gives us a precise description, while the short ones
leave us grasping for meaning. Of course, you can probably find examples of the
reverse.
This is a carefully constructed world, a miniature word puzzle where each piece
reflects an angle of the narrator's chaotic mind.

The Tell-Tale Heart Narrator:

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her
or him?

First person (Central Narrator)

Most Poe narrators are unreliable first person narrators. This doesn't necessarily mean
they don't show up when they say they will, but rather that they either can't or won't
tell us what really happened.

In this case, the narrator is trying to prove his sanity. One bit of proof he offers is his
ability to exercise "dissimulation" (to act or speak one way to mask true feelings or
intention) with the old man. So, if he's trying to prove he's sane, and dissimulation is a
proof of sanity, doesn't that suggest his probably using the old dissimulation on us,
too?
The narrator also admits that due to his intensely powerful sense of hearing, "he can
hear all things in the heaven and in the earth [and] many things in hell" (1). So, he
isn't gripping reality very tightly, due in part to a sick mind, and in another part to a
sick body.
On occasion, he also pretends to be an omniscient narrator. He tells us how the old
man feels and what the old man is thinking. Here's an example: "Presently I heard a
slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. [] I knew the sound well.
Many a night [] it has welled up from my own bosom" (5).
As you can see, the narrator's insight into the man's head is just a reflection of his own
experience. Yet, he's probably right. In this moment he humanizes both himself and
the man through empathy.
Unreliable narrators are compelling because they represent a basic aspect of being
human. We all experience moments of unreliability, where we can't perceive or
remember events accurately. We all get confused and do and say things we don't mean
or don't mean to do or say. In a story like "The Tell-Tale Heart," this unreliability is
taken to extremes.
The scare power in this technique is the nagging knowledge that we could become a
person like the narrator, or a victim of a person like the narrator, a person whose inner
unreliable narrator has totally taken over.

The Tell-Tale Heart Genre

Horror or Gothic Fiction
Horror or Gothic Fiction is one of the easy genres to spot, and also one of the most
fun to explore, as long as you don't mind looking at the hard stuff. Snapped minds,
crypt-like spaces, actual crypts, death and dismemberment, fear, the extremes of
human behavior, a juxtaposition of the "sacred" and the "profane" these are some of
the sure signs you're in a Gothic story, or at least a Gothic moment.
There are many sub-genres within this genre. In the "supernatural Gothic"
supernatural forces (usually connected with the dead and/or the divine) literally cause
the scary stuff that happens. In the "explained Gothic" it seems at first like
supernatural forces are in play, but, by the end of the story, everything is neatly
explained. There's also the "ambiguous Gothic." This is harder to explain, because it's
so ambiguous. These stories are open to multiple interpretations, all of which rely on

facts outside the story. Nothing in the story really makes sense. We have no
"supernatural" or "reasonable" explanation with which to reassure ourselves.
"The Tell-Tale Heart" probably falls in category three. It's been over a hundred years
since the story was written, and nobody knows precisely what to make of it, in spite of
much study.
Poe's work is often considered part of the "Southern Gothic" tradition. Stories in this
genre deal with anxieties and issues related to slavery in the southern U.S., sometimes
in a veiled or hidden way. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination, Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison argues that the work
of Poe does just this, pointing to the short story "The Black Cat" (about a guy who
kills his cat) as a prime example.
We think "The Tell-Tale Heart" might fit under that category, too. Check out the
narrator's "Character Analysis" for more details.

Whats Up With the Title?

At the most obvious level, the title refers to the beating of the old man's heart. The
heart "tells tales" to the narrator. Tales, as you well know, are stories, and can be based
on either real or imagined events. In either case, tellers of tales want to keep the
reader or listener paying attention, and will often resort to extreme exaggerations to
achieve that goal.
So, what tales does the old man's heart tell? We first hear his heart beating on the
eighth night, when he realizes that something is not right in his room. His heart tells a
tale of fear, which in turn makes the narrator extremely angry and gives him the push
he needs to carry out his dastardly deed.
The next time we hear the beating of the heart is after the old man is dead. See, this is
part of why the narrator tells us he cut up the body before burying it under the
floorboards. If it wasn't for that step, we could imagine that the old man maybe wasn't
quite as dead as the narrator thought. Since that isn't a possibility, and since we know
that dead hearts don't beat, the narrator's own hidden guilt over the deed is projected
onto the dead man's heart, thus telling a tale of the narrator's guilty feelings.
So, the title also refers to the narrator's heart. Inside the heart is where our deepest,
truest feelings and emotions live, at least metaphorically speaking. We could look at
the whole story of the old man's murder as a tale told by the narrator, a tale from his
own heart. The title refers to both the narrator's heart, and to the old man's heart, and
to the tales told by both.

Whats Up With the Ending?

As the Invisible Man, in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man says, "The end [is] in the
beginning." As in that novel, chronologically speaking, the end of "The Tell-Tale
Heart" actually takes place before the beginning. We can look at this in several ways.
First, notice the structure of the narrator's tale. It's completely linear, following the
narrator's activities through eight nights. The beginning (which is really the ending) is
a continuation of this linear narrative, but perhaps it's a more immediate continuation
than we might have thought. Look how it seems to start in the middle of a previous
conversation with someone: "True! nervous very, very dreadfully nervous I had
been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" (1).
Maybe this is what the narrator tells the police after he shows them the body. Maybe
this is part of the interrogation process, which is followed by the story of the murder.
Or, maybe much more time passes before the narrator tells the tale. Suppose he was
sentenced to do his time in a psychiatric facility. He's been in a number of years, and
it's possible he'll be released, if he can prove his sanity. So he tells the story to
demonstrate that he's ready to face the outside word. Needless to say, the story would
have the opposite of the intended effect in this situation.
Some interesting things also occur in the literal ending of the story, by which we mean
these lines: "'Villains!' I shrieked, 'dissemble no more! I admit the deed! tear up the
planks! here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!'" (10).
First, the narrator calls the police "villains," and accuses them of "dissembling."
Dissembling is pretty close to "dissimulation" (see paragraph 3). Dissemblers and
dissimulators both act one way in order to conceal true feelings, or intentions. If you
recall, the narrator cites his ability to act sweetly to the old man while inwardly
desiring to kill him as proof of his sanity. Now he suspects the police of doing the
same thing acting like they don't suspect him, even though they do.
The narrator might well be correct in this, though what likely made the police suspect
him was not that they could hear what hears, but his own actions, specifically, this: "I
foamed I raved I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and
grated it upon the boards" (9).
In any case, by calling the police "villains" for acting one way and feeling another, the
narrator admits (in a round about way) that he too is a villain. By connecting his
auditory hallucinations with the old man's heart, he admits he actually feels bad about
what he did, or at least knows it's wrong. That sounds something like sanity, which
might explain why the narrator would end the story meant to prove his sanity with
what, at first glance, looks like a confession to murder.