The Tell-Tale Heart Setting

There are two substantial settings in The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. One is the old man shares a house with the narrator where the location and the murder take place from which the narrator tells the story. However, for the story, the most important setting is within the narrator's mind where he is very obsessed with the old man. Well he isn't obsessed with the old man, the source of his mysterious obsession is the old man evil eye and that infuriates the narrator because the old man is hardly more than the evil eye.

One of the questions we keep asking ourselves when reading this story is why does the narrator kill the old man? In the story the narrator says he feels or has no hatred towards the old man, he doesn't
For example the beating of the old man’s heart sounds like the ticking of a watch wrapped in cotton; the old man is said to listen to death watches (a kind of beetle that makes a ticking sound) on the wall, time seems to slow down and almost stop when he sticks his head in the old man’s chamber. To understand this weird obsession with time and its connection with the beating of a heart, the reader must relate it to the title and ask, what tale does a heart tell? The answer is that the tale every heart tells is that of time that time inevitably passing, every beat of one’s heart bringing one closer to death.

One of Poe’s major contributions to this short story was his conception of the plot not simply as a series of events, from one thing after another but associated with all those details in the story that relate to and revolve around a central theme. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is very well a murder mystery in which the narrator concocts a plot to kill the old man. However, the real plot of the story is Poe’s elaborate pattern of psychological obsession and displacement, as one man tries to accomplish what all human beings wish to do to defeat the ticking of the clock that marks one’s inevitable movement toward