The Tell-Tale Heart

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

• The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is believed to be Edgar Allan Poe himself, which may explain the calm disposition and focus on sanity.
• The story is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, who is untrustworthy and commonly used in first-person narratives.
• The narrator's gender is ambiguous, but it is reasonable to assume that the narrator could be female due to the era's prevalence of female house servants.
• The narrator prioritizes her sanity above all else and readily admits guilt as long as she is deemed lucid.
• The narrator suffers from an "over-acuteness of the senses," including a heightened ability to hear things, even supernatural sounds.
• The narrator is fixated on the old man's cataract eye, which she views as synonymous with evil and plans to murder both him and the eye.
• The narrator's condition is speculated to be early schizophrenia, which often includes auditory hallucinations.
• The old man is described as wealthy, fearful of the night, and has a cataract eye that the narrator finds repulsive.
• The police arrive after a neighbor reports a disturbance, and they stay in the house for some time, possibly out of suspicion.
• The neighbor's report suggests that something loud enough to warrant police action occurred at midnight.
• The story begins in medias res, with the narrator asserting their sanity during a confession, challenging the stigma of mental illness during Poe's time.
• The story revolves around the narrator's obsession with the old man's pale blue eye, which symbolizes death and serves as a reminder of mortality.