The Tell-Tale Heart

Another story from Edgar Allan Poe and this time someone ends up dead,

someone is crazy.And someone just does not know when to shut up.

The CharactersAn Unreliable Narrator

Nervous and deranged man who swears he is NOT CRAZY

An Old man with an “evil eye”Harmless; his eye upsets his “friend”

The Police Very Friendly

A NeighborNosy

Our Paranoidnarrator

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*Inference Interruption:The more someone gets angry as they try to tell you they are not crazy, they are probably crazy.

Q: WHY DO WE INFER HE’S CRAZY?

A. THE NARRATOR’S OBSESSIONS

For someone who isn’t crazy, he is preoccupied with really unimportant stuff

NARRATOR’S OBSESSIONS - 1His own sanity- he really

wants you to know he isn’t crazy

NARRATOR’S OBSESSIONS - 2

The narrator really hates the old man’s cataract.

NARRATOR’S OBSESSIONS - 3

The old man’s heartbeat- it is a BEAT he can’t ignore… but how often do you hear someone’s heart?

The RICH old man-HAS A CATARACT & hires the narrator

*Inference Interruption:The narrator takes care of the old

man.We are never told for sure, we infer it.

The Police- someone ends up dead

Setting:Most action takes place in the old man’s big house.

However…The story begins in an unknown place, not in the old man’s house

Have to infer where the narrator might be…

He is trying to convince someone is not crazy…

Wheredo we go when others think we arecrazy?

Moodthe narrator hears all kinds of noises- pay attention to what they are- they set up the mood

Figures of Speech

• Personification– “Death in

approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him and enveloped the victim.” [Here, Death is a person.]

• Simile– “So I opened it–you cannot

imagine how stealthily, stealthily–until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.”

• Irony– “I was never kinder to the

old man than during the whole week before I killed him.”

Themes• Theme #1

– A human being has a perverse, wicked side–another self–that can goad him into doing evil things that have no apparent motive

• Unable to look upon the eye any longer, he decided to kill the old man

• Theme #2– Fear of discovery can

bring about discovery• The narrator begins to

crack under the pressure of a police investigation

• Theme #3– The evil within is worse

than the evil without • The narrator is inwardly

ugly and repulsive, for he plans and executes murder; his soul is more repulsive than the old man's eye