The Tell-Tale Heart

Believing that you live in a house with evil lurking around every corner , you don’t know what to do. Then one night, out of nowhere, the “evil” kills you; all because an eye. This may not make much sense right now, but after reading the story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allen Poe, it will all tie in together; just like the characters mode of literature, and the symbols do.


The symbolism in this story helped capture the scene. First of all, the author mentions that at midnight, the caretaker of the old man would come into the elder’s room and stare at him. Midnight is supposed to symbolize something awful or that something bad is about to happen. After all, this time is an eerie time of day; or night, I should say. It’s an evil symbol because this is the instance when the caretaker selfishly slaughters the old man. The next symbol is the “evil eye” or the “vulture eye”. Because of the old man’s sickly eye, the caretaker decided to kill him, for the one and only reason being that it scares him and constantly drove him crazy. It would make him apprehensive just to think that the “evil eye” was vigilantly glancing at him; giving him a horrid piercing feeling of discomfort. This symbolized that someone was always looking out for him. Thinking that he was looking at him in a bad way, he could no longer take the menacing stares. The final symbol was the old man’s heart. When the policemen where in the old man’s room, questioning the caretaker, the man started to hear the elder’s heart beating. This, of course, symbolized the careless caretaker’s conscience. He was now beginning to regret the decision he had made to kill the loving old man who meant no harm to anyone.

The symbol of the dead man’s beating heart gave away the mode of literature as a. Since it is scientifically impossible for a person’s heart to be pounding after they have been diced to pieces like portions of vegetables on a cutting board after being chopped to slices by a metallic blade on a knife, it is unrealistic. It starts with the caretakers world in chaos because the old man’s “vulture eye” is causing him to lose control. That’s when he decides to kill him. When he finally completes his mission, of killing the old man, that is his rise to power and he is feeling like no one could ever find out about what he did. Then comes his tragic flaw; his conscience is getting the best of him and he confesses to the policemen what had occurred during the night’s events. The death symbolism was that it was the end of the “evil eye” and the end of the caretakers appalling plan. Most importantly, it was the end of sanity for the caretaker.

As you can tell, the caretaker is one messed-up-in-the-head person; the old man was the exact opposite of him. The two main characters in the story could not have been any more different from each other. I say this because the caretaker was the kind of person that would pretend to be your friend, and once you fully trusted him, he would backstab you…literally! Whereas, the old man was kind and gentle. From the fragile features of his personality, you could tell that he was not a “two-faced” person, as we would call the caretaker. Plus, the coldhearted man was devious and sneaky The one and only characteristic that they may have had in common was their conscience. But, the terrible man didn’t listen to his until it was too late.

The people in the story, the mode, and the symbols in the tale all ended up being related to each other. One thing that they all included the lesson of listening to your heart and thinking, ”Is this the right thing to do?” If you don’t listen to that natural instinct, the situation that you’re in may not end in the best possible way that you could have possibly imagined.