Response to "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Readers Response #3: “The Tell-Tale Heart” What was found to be interesting about Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is when the narrator says “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” (440). Poe uses foreshadowing to shows us how the narrator is going to do something bad, and come to feel guilty about his actions afterwards. The narrator decides to murder an old man because “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so…I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (440). When Poe wrote this it was a starting point of interest because it was the narrator explaining what terrible act he was planning on committing, and what he would come to feel guilty about that would haunt him. The theme for this short story is guilt, the guilt the narrator feels after taking the old man’s eye and eventually his life is what causes him to feeling he has to reassure himself he is sane, and to confessing to his crime. The narrator feels he must rid the old man of his eye for no other reason than that of his eye. So the narrator “undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously-I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye” (440). The narrator continued to do this for eight nights, until on the eighth night he was able to successfully liberate the old man from his eye which “chilled the very marrow in [the narrators] bones” (441). After the narrator is able to free the eye from the old man is when the guilt kicked in, and Poe used the symbol of the old man’s heart beating to signify the narrator’s guilt. “Now I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart” (441).
The beating of the old man’s heart drove the