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"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, which was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843; Poe republished it in his periodical The Broadway Journal for August 23, 1845. It is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and is one of Poe's most famous short stories.

Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Major themes 3 Works inspired 4 External links

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a first-person narrative of a genderless narrator who is taking care of an old man with a clouded eye. The narrator's paranoid symptoms lead to an irrational fear of the weird clouded eye. The narrator becomes so distressed by the eye a plot forms to murder the old man. For eight nights, the narrator opens the door of the old man's room, a process which takes him a full hour, watching and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. However, the old man's eye is shut, hiding the clouded eye, and the narrator loses the urge to kill. One night, though, the old man awakens as the narrator watches, revealing the eye, the narrator strikes, smothering the old man with his own mattress. The narrator proceeds to chop the body up, and hide the pieces under the floorboards. The narrator then cleans the place up to hide all signs of the crime. When the narrator reports that the police (whether a delusion or real is unclear) respond to a call placed by a neighbor who heard a distressful scream, the narrator invites them to look around, confident that they will not find any evidence of the murder. They sit around the old man's room, right on top of the very hiding place of the dead body, yet suspect nothing. The narrator, however, begins to hear a faint noise. As the noise grows louder, the narrator hallucinates that it is the heartbeat of the old man coming from under the floorboards. This paranoia increases as the officers seem to pay no attention to the sound, which is loud enough for the narrator to admit to having heard. Shocked by the constant beating of the heart and a feeling that the officers must be aware of the heartbeats, the narrator loses control and confesses to killing the old man and tells them to tear up the floorboards to reveal the body.

Throughout the story the narrator insists on being sane, yet at the same time, giving the impression of serious hallucinations or paranoia, possibly caused by guilt from having murdered an elderly man.

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Poe's short stories often have a single, unified theme that reaches the reader through diction, characterization, plot, dialogue and other elements. The theme of this story might be guilt or madness. The story also contains the theme of a corpse interred in a house, commonly present in "The Black Cat" and "The Fall of the House of Usher". The corpse invariably symbolizes some flawed portion of the narrator's personality - in this case, his inability to see the world with a clear eye - and the house represents the narrator. Burying the corpse within the house represents the narrator's attempt to bury flaws rather than deal with them, as the concealment of the narrator's wife in "The Black Cat" represents the narrator's desire to wall problems within. This burial always leads to the narrator's downfall in Poe's stories, because the narrator has failed to deal with his problem, and so it resurfaces later on. The madmen in Poe's stories are usually monomaniacal. The nervousness with teeth in "Berenice" is comparable, and to an extent, in "The Black Cat" by an obsession with another eye.

An animated film version by UPA, read by James Mason, The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), is included among the films preserved in the United States National Film Registry. The 1953 animated short is featured on the two disc version of the DVD Hellboy. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is one of several songs inspired by Poe stories on the album Tales of Mystery and Imagination (original version 1976, CD remix 1987) by The Alan Parsons Project. It is sung in an appropriately hysterical style by Arthur Brown. In 2003, Lou Reed released The Raven, an album solely based on poems and short stories by Poe; featured was "The Tell-Tale Heart." Also, the song "Who Am I? (Tripitena's Song)" has the line: "I'd like to solve the mysteries of life by cutting someone's throat or removing their heart. You'd like to see it beat."

In 1995, Mojo Press and artist Bill Fountain published a collection of graphic versions of Poe stories under the title The Tell Tale Heart, featuring a female character as the tortured narrator of the title story. An episode of The Simpsons ("Lisa's Rival," September 11, 1994) featured a "Tell-Tale Heart"-inspired act of revenge between Lisa and a new student (voiced by Winona Ryder). The season 1 episode titled "The Telltale Head" is a reference to "The Tell-Tale Heart." An episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, Squeaky Boots, has Mr. Krabs burying a pair of squeaky boots underneath the floorboards, only to begin hearing the noise more and more before snapping and digging up, boiling, and eating the boots.

On the Insane Clown Posse's 1995 LP, The Riddle Box, the song "Ol' Evil Eye" is based on the story, and even has quotes of the story read aloud.

A portion of the 1995 computer game The Dark Eye requires the player to enact the plot of "The Tell-Tale Heart" from the point of view of either the story's narrator or the old man.

A Tiny Toons haloween special had a "kiddie" version of the story. Plucky Duck destroys Hamton's vacuum cleaner to make the sound it makes stop.

• "The Tell-Tale Heart" - Full text of the first printing, from the Pioneer, 1843
• The Tell-Tale Heart, online at Ye Olde Library
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Edgar Allan Poe
Poems
Poetry (1824) • O, Tempora! O, Mores! (1825) • Song (1827) • Imitation (1827) • Spirits of the Dead (1827) • A Dream (1827) • Stanzas (1827) • Tamerlane (1827) • The Lake (1827) • Evening Star (1827) • A Dream (1827) • To Margaret (1827) • The Happiest Day (1827) • To The River —— (1828) (1828) • Romance (1829) • Fairy-Land (1829) • To Science (1829) • To Isaac Lea (1829) • Al Aaraaf (1829) • An Acrostic (1829) • Elizabeth (1829) • To Helen (1831) • A Paean (1831) • The Sleeper (1831) • The City in the Sea (1831) • The Valley of Unrest (1831) • Israfel (1831) • The Coliseum (1833) • Enigma (1833) • Fanny (1833) • Serenade (1833) • Song of Triumph from Epimanes (1833) • Latin Hymn (1833) • To One in Paradise (1833) • Hymn (1835) • Politician (1835) • May Queen Ode (1836) • Spiritual Song (1836) • Bridal Ballad (1837) • To Zante (1837) • The Haunted Palace (1839) • Silence, a Sonnet (1839) • Lines on Joe Locke (1843) • The Conqueror Worm (1843) • Lenore (1843) • Eulalie (1843) • A Campaign Song (1844) • Dream-Land (1844) • Impromptu. To Kate Carol (1845) • To Frances (1845) • The Divine Right of Kings (1845) • Epigram for Wall Street (1845) • The Raven (1845) • A Valentine (1846) • Beloved Physician (1847) • An Enigma (1847) • Deep in Earth (1847) • Ulalume (1847) • Lines on Ale (1848) • To Marie Louise (1848) • Evangeline (1848) • Eldorado (1849) • For Annie (1849) • The Bells (1849) • Annabel Lee (1849) • A Dream Within A Dream (1850) • Alone (1875)
Tales
Metzengerstein (1832) • The Duc De L'Omelette (1832) • A Tale of Jerusalem (1832) • Loss of Breath (1832) • Bon-Bon (1832) • MS. Found in a Bottle (1833) • The Assignation (1834) • Berenice (1835) • Morella (1835) • Lionizing (1835) • The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1835) • King Pest (1835) • Shadow - A Parable (1835) • Four Beasts in One - The Homo-Cameleopard (1836) • Mystification (1837) • Silence - A Fable (1837) • Ligeia (1838) • How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838) • A Predicament (1838) • The Devil in the Belfry (1839) • The Man That Was Used Up (1839) • The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) • William Wilson (1839) • The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839) • Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling (1840) • The Business Man (1840) • The Man of the Crowd (1840) • The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) • A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841) • The Island of the Fay (1841) • The Colloquy of Monos and Una (1841) • Never Bet the Devil Your Head (1841) • Eleonora (1841) • Three Sundays in a Week (1841) • The Oval Portrait (1842) • The Masque of the Red Death (1842) • The Landscape Garden (1842) • The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) • The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) • The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) • The Gold-Bug (1843) • The Black Cat (1843) • Diddling (1843) • The Spectacles (1844) • A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1844) • The Premature Burial (1844) • Mesmeric Revelation (1844) • The Oblong Box (1844) • The Angel of the Odd (1844) • Thou Art the Man (1844) • The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. (1844) • The Purloined Letter (1844) • The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845) • Some Words with a Mummy (1845) • The Power of Words (1845) • The Imp of the Perverse (1845) • The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845) • The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) • The Sphinx (1846) • The Cask of Amontillado (1846) • The Domain of Arnheim (1847) • Mellonta Tauta (1849) • Hop-Frog (1849) • Von Kempelen and His Discovery (1849) • X-ing a Paragrab (1849) • Landor's Cottage (1849)
Other Works
Essays: Maelzel's Chess Player (1836) • The Daguerreotype (1840) • The Philosophy of Furniture (1840) • A Few Words on Secret Writing (1841) • The Rationale of Verse (1843) • Morning on the Wissahiccon (1844) • Old English Poetry (1845) • The Philosophy of Composition (1846) • The Poetic Principle (1846) • Eureka (1848) Hoaxes: • The Balloon-Hoax (1844) Novels: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) • The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) Plays: Scenes From 'Politian' (1835) Other: The Conchologist's First Book (1839) • The Light-House (1849)
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