Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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Tell-Tale Heart “The Tell-Tale Heart,” written by Edgar Allan Poe, is a short story told by a man filled with fear of the unknown. He kills his neighbor simply due to the fact that he had a strange eye, then leaves the mutilated body under the dead man’s floor boards. The narrator feels no remorse at first, but later admits to the crime because of his guilty conscience. If there is one important lesson to take away from this story, it’s that no one should ever let their imaginations and suspicions control them. In the second paragraph, the narrator writes, “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture- a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees-…show more content…
He was practically in the clear, until his guilt caught up to him. “No doubt I now grew very pale;- but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased- and what could I do?” This was him describing how it was when he could hear the old man’s heartbeat through the floorboards. “And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible that they heard? -no, no! They heard!- they suspected!- they knew!- they were making a mockery of my horror!- this I thought, and this I think.” After that, he turned himself in, as he thought that the authorities already knew what crime he had committed. The narrator probably would’ve gotten away with it, but he let his imagination run wild. Now, something someone might point out is that the old man was right to be suspicious the night that he died. But was he really? He spent the last waking hours of his life in a state of terror, and that’s no way to go. “I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not.” Yes, his suspicions had been correct, but they had done him no
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