604-103-MQ Short story OUTLINE
Cégep de Saint Laurent
Anna Soule

Names : Danial Savad
The outline is in point form. Please use key words or phrases, not complete sentences.

OUTLINE

Title of the Short story: The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe

Author:
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Massachusetts in 1809 and spent a tumultuous childhood marked by the disappearance of his parents. He was adopted by a merchant of Richmond and received a British education since 1815 After a brief attempt to join the army, he decided to devote himself to writing. His first poems did not win any particular success, he moved in with his aunt in Baltimore, whose daughter he then married. In 1838 he published the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the extraordinary stories in 1839, were considered the success of his work. He found it very difficult to integrate as a writer in New York. However, he published The Raven (1845), the most striking poem of his career. The death of his wife in 1847, plunges him further into alcoholism, which will eventually kill him in 1849.His works, were translated by Baudelaire in France, and won a resounding success in the country and greatly influenced literature.

Background:

As a Poet, novelist and short story writer, Poe is particularly strong in the art of storytelling, a genre whose brevity allows to develop his theory of the effect, according to which all elements of the text must contribute to the achievement of a sole effect.
He also worked as a literary critic and editor although he is best known as an author. He was basically the creator of the detective story. Summary of the short story:

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story where the narrator is in a first person perspective, although he's anonymous, he tries to convince the reader of his rationality, and how he suffers from a disease which "sharpened his senses." The old man with whom he lived had the look of a "vulture", it caused so much suffering to the narrator that he decided to kill him. The narrator emphasizes the caution with which he committed the murder to show that he is not madman. For seven nights, he opened the bedroom door of the old man, an action that took him an hour. However, each time, the vulture eye of the old man remained closed, preventing him from doing the “work”.
The eighth night, the old man wakes up and sits on his bed while the narrator performs his nightly ritual. Rather than to retreat, he decides, after a while, to partly open his lantern. A ray of light precisely hits the eye of the old man, revealing that he is wide open. Perceiving the heart beat of the old man, driven by fear, he decided to strike: he jumps on the old man and throws him on the floor. Then he cut up his victim and hid the pieces under the floor.
However, a neighbor heard a scream and alerted the police. The narrator invites the three officers who came to his door to do a search, convinced that they will find nothing. He explains to the cops that the old man is on a journey and shows them that his treasures are still in their right place. Confident, he brings them chairs, and now everyone is sitting in the room of the old man, just above the location where the body was buried.
And so he feels more and more comfortable, the narrator begins to hear a weak noise, becoming stronger and stronger. He comes to the conclusion that