The Tell Tale Heart, by: Edgar Allan Poe

The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, is a story about an old man that has this incredible blue eye and this young man who can't stand the eye. The young man tries to kill the man but it doesn't work because the eye has to be open. After many failing attempts the young man finally gets to hit the blue eye with a flashlight and it makes the old man to feel pain. The young man doesn't find a better opportunity to go and asphyxiate the man and kill him. Then the police arrived and starting to ask the young man some questions and he denies them all. After a long silence the young man starts to hear the old man's heartbeats and he starts to freak out. Then he confesses to the police that he did kill the man because he was already getting mad about the beating heart.

The imagery used in this story was really detailed and it helped me to understand the story much better since it makes me feel like as if I was there. For instance:

"His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and waits while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat."  (1)

Here Edgar Allan Poe is applying sight since it is talking about an eye. And in this picture it is showing a vulture since in the story it talks about an eye that looks like if it was a vulture's eye.


In this story the main character or protagonist is the young man that wants the old man's eye to be closed. He is desperate to disappear the eye from his sight.  For instance:

"When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided that I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!" (1-2)

As I said before, in this example, Edgar Allan Poe is showing how the young man is getting mad because of the eye and he wants the eye to disappear.


In the end you can say that this story is really strong but also interesting. This story is really good for some readers that like scary stories but not recomendable for people who don't like this kind of stories.