About this audiobook
This is the full text of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), read aloud word for word in about twelve minutes. The video highlights each word as it is spoken, so you can follow the original 1843 wording, and adds a who’s-who, five hard words and a short recap after each of three parts. The narration is a synthetic voice (Kokoro text-to-speech). The text comes from the public-domain Project Gutenberg edition, ebook 2148, and nothing is cut.
Who is who
The narrator is never named, and he keeps insisting that he is sane. The old man is the person he says he loves, though he cannot stand the old man’s pale blue eye. The officers are three policemen who come to the house after a neighbour hears a shriek.
Five hard words
- Dissimulation: hiding your real thoughts or feelings behind a pretence.
- Hearken: an old word that means listen closely.
- Sagacity: sharp judgment, or wisdom.
- Scantlings: small beams of timber. Here, the beams under a floor.
- Dissemble: to hide what you really know or feel.
What happens in part one
The narrator swears he is not mad, only sharp-eared, and then tells you what he did. He says he loves the old man, but he cannot bear the old man’s pale blue eye, which he compares to a vulture’s. So he decides to kill him. Every night at midnight, for seven nights, he opens the door a crack and lets one thin ray of light fall on the eye. The eye is always closed, so he cannot go through with it, and each morning he greets the old man as cheerfully as ever.
What happens in part two
On the eighth night the narrator’s thumb slips on the lantern, and the old man sits up in bed and cries out, “Who’s there?” The narrator freezes in the dark for a whole hour while the old man sits listening. When he finally lets a ray fall on the open eye, he hears a low, quick sound, and takes it for the old man’s heart. As it grows louder, he fears a neighbour will hear it. He throws open the lantern, drags the old man to the floor and pulls the heavy bed over him. Soon the sound stops, and the old man is dead.
What happens in part three
The narrator cuts up the body and hides it under three planks of the floor, proud that he left no stain. At four o’clock three police officers arrive, because a neighbour heard a shriek. He welcomes them in, says the shriek was his own in a dream, and sets his chair right over the hiding place. While they chat, he begins to hear a ringing, then a low, quick sound that keeps growing louder. The story never says whether the officers hear it. He is sure they do, and he screams at them to tear up the planks.
Is it really a heart?
The sound is the one thing the story leaves open. The narrator calls it the beating of the old man’s heart, but he is the only one who says he hears it, and he has told us from the first line that his senses are sharp and his nerves are not steady. Our reading, which is an opinion, is that the story is about a mind that cannot hide what it has done from itself.
