Short storyGothic · 1843Study guide · no full textGentle

The Tell-Tale Heart

The story is over in ten minutes and every sentence is a defence that convicts the speaker. Count how often he insists on his own sanity.

Horror Guilt Madness Truth

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Guilt — how other works handle it →Madness — how other works handle it →

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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