Chapter - 15

The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe

Summary of the story

The meaning of the title is “The heart which reveals or indicates something secret or hidden”. This story is about a man (The Storyteller), who kills an old man. The old man’s eyes cause trouble. He had the eyes of a vulture. When his eyes fell on the narrator, his blood always went cold. So, one day he decided to kill the old man and destroy that eye. Every night at midnight he went very quietly to the old man’s door and opened the door slowly and put his head inside the room. He did the same things for seven nights but the old man’s eyes were always closed. He wanted to kill him when his eyes would open.

The narrator was oversensitive to hearing. When he entered the old man’s room in order to kill him, there came to his ears a lo, dull, quick sound such as a watch makes when enveloped in old man’s watch but he made mistake and thought it was the sound of his heart beating.

On the eight-night at midnight, he did the same thing but this time when he turned on the lamp, he made a sound and the old man woke up. The old man sat up and asked who was there. The narrator turned on the lamp and saw his eyes clearly. He suddenly had a feeling of power. He became angry when he looked at it. He entered into the room, covered his head with the bed and the old man was dead.

He cut off the dead body in several pieces and put beneath the floor. But he didn’t remove the watch off the old man. The old man’s dying shriek was overhead and the three police officers came to make inquiries. They discovered nothing and the murderer claimed that the old man was absent in the country. But the ringing was coming from the dead body. He thought it was the heart beating of the old man’s dead body. Because of his nervous disease and the police officers laugh made him confess his crime. He revealed his crime to the policeman that he had murdered the old man and had hidden his dead body there.