The Tell-Tale Heart is a psychological story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story has two major characters: the narrator and the old man. The narrator is an obsessed man of active senses. He claims that he can hear every mild and whispering sound very clearly. He has craze of homicide. The next character is an old man who has a pale thick blue vulture eye. He has plenty of gold coins in his room. He keeps his room dark so that no one can see his property. The narrator has not the vices of common men; he is neither greedy nor jealous. He is a good-mannered man. He behaves nicely with the old man, but when he looks at his vulture eyes, his blood becomes cold and he suffers from death like fear. The vulture eye is the very panic to him. He hates his vulture eye and can’t tolerate it at all. He decides to get rid of such panic vulture eye by killing the old man.
He makes a strategy to kill the old man. He visits his door at midnight, unlatches the doors and makes a space to look inside the room very peacefully and continuously by passing hours after hours. He undoes the lantern for a thin single ray and gives its focus on his eye. He finds the old man is in his sleep. He gets back to latch the door, continuously and calmly. He can’t kill the old man because he has slept with his vulture eye closed. Therefore, he does not become angry.
He continues his work. He passes seven fruitless nights. On the eighth night when he keeps his head inside the room and keeps his thumb on the tin-fastening to raise the beam of light, his thumb slips producing a sound. This sound awakes the old man from his sleep. He sits on his bed and enquires about the appearance of anybody else in his room. The narrator keeps his body fixed like stone. He listens to the groan of his heart and assumes that the old man is in deep fear; he feels the sound is charged with extreme fear. Passing some hours, he throws the beam of light on his eye and looks at his vulture eye. At the same moment he listens to a dull, quick and muffled sound. He thinks it is the sound of the old man’s heart beating. This sound stimulates him. He throws the lamp to one side of the room and cries, instantly leaps on his bed and smoothers the old man with his heavy bed. And, after a while the old man passes the world.
He dismembers his corpse into pieces and packs them under the wooden floor of the room by removing three planks. After packing them he repairs the planks very wisely without any room for suspicion. He keeps some chairs over the wooden floor and laughs for his success. It is 4pm. Three police officers come to investigate the situation. The narrator entraps them in word net and makes them satisfied. They sit on the chair on the request of the narrator.
The police officers begin to laugh on their own business. Their laughing makes him excited. He thinks they are insulting and mocking him. Perhaps they know him and his contemptuous deed, the murder! At the same moment, he listens to the dull, quick tick-tack sound coming from under the planks. The sound puzzles him. He has sensitive ears, so every moment the sound seems to him very loud. He can’t tolerate the loudness of the sound nor can he tolerate the constant laughing of the policemen. His heart betrays him. He is charged with impulse and confesses his crime. The title is also justified in this way.
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