Back to: The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Table of Contents
The Narrator
He is the central character of the story. He is aware of his insane thoughts and yet justifies them as sane because he can still strategize and think intelligently.
He is hypersensitive to sounds and images and is extremely bugged by the old man’s ugly looking eye. He is obsessively concerned by it and decides to kill the man in order to permanently close the eye.
He manages to plot a scheme and ends up killing the man one night. However, the guilt wrecks him from inside and he ends up confessing his crime in front of the policemen on the scene.
The Old Man
The old man is a person of great suspense. He seems to be on good terms with the narrator and is, by all means, a good person. However, he has one ugly looking pale eye and that creates a problem in the mind of the narrator.
He seems to be a quiet and lonely person and probably lives alone in his room. That makes him an easy target for the narrator and ends up being murdered mercilessly in his own room.
There seems to be no more knowledge about his character or social life as he dies without revealing much about his life.
Policemen
There are three policemen that come to the murder scene to enquire about the noise complaints. They are jovial and do not suspect foul play when they meet the narrator.
In fact, they are easily duped by the narrator’s calm demeanor and end up chatting with him for a long time. In the end, the narrator shouts out his confession and they dig up the floor to find the body parts of the old man.
