The Tell-Tale Heart

A) Author : Edgar Allan Poe

5 facts about Poe:

-He was born Edgar Poe and he had lost both parents at the age of three. He was adopted by the Allans and they renamed him Edgar Allan Poe.
-He married his thirteen years old cousin when he was twenty-six.
-He was found delirious and sick in the streets and wearing clothes that were not his own. He was brought to an hospital and he died four days after. His final words were: ''Lord help my poor soul''.
-He was one of the first writer to live solely on the money of his writings.
-His first work was published anonymously.

B) Plot (corrections made)

The Tell-Tale Heart is narrated by an anonymous man who assures us that he is not mad. He tells us about an old man he lives with and his dreadful white eye. He explains how he loved the old man, but hated the eye so much that he only wanted to destroy it. So every night, at midnight, he would slowly open the old man's door to enter his room. Then he opened a lantern so that only a tiny ray of light would reveal the eye. For seven days, the eye was closed, so the storyteller did not do a thing. However, in the night after, he made a sharp noise while opening the lantern and the old man awakened. The narrator waited anxiously in the dark, but the old man stayed upright in his bed, completely still. When he finally undid the lantern, the ray of light fell on the blank eye. A heartbeat could be heard and the man thought it was the old man's. Rage filling him, he smothered the old man under the mattress.

The old man's body was hidden under the floor when three police officers came at the door. The neighbour had heard a scream and he had called the police. The storyteller showed the whole house to them so they could see nothing happened and that the old man was on vacations He said to them it was him that screamed when he awoke from a nightmare. The policemen where convinced and were about to leave the house when the narrator invited them for some tea. It was then, when they were seated, that he heard the heartbeats again. They were getting louder and he was sure the police officers heard it too. He thought they were jesting with him, for it was evident they could hear that loud sound. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and he told them where he had hidden the body so the heartbeats could stop.

C) Analysis

1) Setting: The narrator lives with the old man. The story
2) characters:
A) The narrator, who is the main character, is anonymous. The gender is unspecified, but we can assume it's a man because Poe always narrated from a man's point of view.
B) The old man with the blank eye, wich makes the narrator nervous.
C) The neighbour, who called the police when he heard a scream
D) The three policemen, who searched the house and arrested the narrator.
3) Themes:
A) A human being has a perverse, wicked side -another self- that can provoke him to doing evil things without an apparent motive.
B) Fear of discovery can bring about discovery.
C) The evil within is worse than the evil without.
4) Point of View: First person narrative
5) Sentence Style: Objet -there was none. Passion -there was none. ''I loved the man.''
6) Figure of speech:
Anaphora(repetition of sentences): I heard things in heaven. I heard things in hell
Personification: Death. ''Death becomes a black shadow that approaches him''
Simile: ''A single ray of light like the web of a spider.''
Alliteration(repetion of sounds): ''Observe, how! heartily, how! (...), How!''
Irony: ''I was never kinder to the old man during that week before I killed him''