Tell-Tale Heart

Tell-Tale Heart
By Max Rogers

What would you do if every step you took, every corner you turned and every breath you drew, you were being watched? That’s exactly how the main character and narrator of the story “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe felt about the man with the glass eye who lived with him. The story does not give much information about the actual relationship between the two men, however, it does go into great detail about the ever presence of the man with the “vulture eye.” The narrator is so freaked out by the man’s eye that he eventually winds up killing him in the night, cuts up his body into hundreds of little pieces and buries them beneath the floor boards of his home.

So you ask, was he insane or really getting watched by an evil glass eye? Well, I think he is nuts. I think we all do, and the story gives us several clues. Not only did he kill a man and cut him up and put his body below the floor, he also heard noises. Sounded like he was paranoid. When the police came to his home, he was so consumed with guilt that he thought a loud heart was beating below the floor. All this time he kept saying that he was not insane, but the story painted a picture that he really was crazy.


The author did an excellent job of keeping the reader in suspense. There were little details about the relationship between the two main characters, but the details that led up to the murder made my heart pound. This contrast really drew me in. The story actually kind of made me a bit scarred, and to this day, I still think twice about what may lie beneath wooden floors every time I walk on them.