The Tell-Talle Heart

"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 eyes are 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.