The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart Summary | The Tell-Tale Heart Summary

The first story in this collection, The Tell-Tale Heart, really sets the stage for much of what is to come. As with all of the other stories, this tale is told through the first-person narrative. It begins with our narrator, already quite agitated, denying that he is mad. He explains that he is not mad, that he simply suffers from a heightening of his senses. He says that he will calmly tell his story.

The first thing he informs his reader of is that at some point, though he loved the old man in question and had no desire for his possessions, he decided that the old man must die. It is the man's eye, he says, a single pale blue eye that made his blood run cold and drove him to form his murderous plan.

The narrator once again asserts that he is not mad, and he offers his well-laid plot out as proof. He would be very kind to the old man during the day and then, every night at midnight, he would sneak to his room. He would open the door to the bedroom just enough that his head would fit in. He would carefully put in an unlit lantern, then he would place his head in very slowly. This process could take up to an hour, he boasts, because he was so careful. He would then shine a single ray upon the dreaded eye, but finding it never open, he could not commit the murder; for it was the eye he hated and not the old man. This went on for seven nights.

On the eighth night the old man awakens, sitting up in bed. He knows someone is there, and the narrator watches as he listens to the silence, terrified. Finally the narrator hears him groan in fear, and soon he opens the lantern and allows the beam to fall upon the eye. The sight of the eye enrages him, as does a sound he begins to hear, a sound he attributes to his heightened senses - the old man's heart. The sound becomes so loud to the narrator that he begins to fear a neighbor may hear it, so he throws open the lantern and leaps into the room. The old man screams once and the narrator drags him from the bed, pulling the bed on top of him. Finally, the heartbeat ceases and the old man is dead. The narrator proceeds to dismember the body in the bathtub and then bury the old man beneath the floorboards.

Just as he finishes his gruesome task, policemen arrive at his door. They have come in response to a call from a neighbor who had heard the old man's cry. The narrator is very confident that his crime will go undetected and offers to give the policemen a tour of the house. He tells them that the old man is on vacation abroad; he even goes so far as to invite them to sit and chat, placing his own chair directly over the spot where he buried the old man's body.

As they talk, he begins to once again hear the beating of the old man's heart. He grows more and more agitated, imagining that the policemen can hear it and are mocking him. Finally, he can stand it no more and jumps up, confessing his crime.