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A short summary of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of The Tell-Tale Heart.
A summary of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) in Edgar Allan Poe's Poe’s Short Stories. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Poe’s Short Stories and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
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“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a story by Edgar Allan Poe written in 1843. It is about a murderer who tries to persuade his readers of his mental stability while telling the tale of the brutish act. He denies that he suffers from some mental illness and openly boasts of his cleverness and cunning behavior.
Plot summary. Illustration by Harry Clarke, 1919. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a first-person narrative told by an unnamed narrator. Despite insisting that they are sane, the narrator suffers from a disease (nervousness) which causes "over-acuteness of the senses".
Summary: “The Tell-Tale Heart” “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known short stories, first published in The Pioneer in January 1843. The work is written in the Gothic horror style from the second-person point of view .
Poe uses his words economically in the “Tell-Tale Heart”—it is one of his shortest stories—to provide a study of paranoia and mental deterioration. Poe strips the story of excess detail as a way to heighten the murderer’s obsession with specific and unadorned entities: the old man’s eye, the heartbeat, and his own claim to sanity.
