The narrator
A voice that proves guilt by trying too hard to prove reason.
Romanticism · Short story · 1843
The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe
A narrator insists on sanity while describing a murder committed because of an old man’s eye. The heart under the floorboards will not stay buried.
Gothic tale
Characters
The old man
Reduced to an eye—the tale’s emblem of being seen.
Themes
Guilt
Conscience becomes sound, then confession.
Madness and method
Precision is offered as evidence of sanity and becomes its opposite.
Motifs
A vulture eye that turns looking into persecution.
Time, terror, and the body as an accuser.