The document summarizes Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" and provides psychological context. It discusses how the story is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who kills an old man and insists on his own sanity. The document also notes how Poe often wrote about inner conflicts and struggles in his works, drawing from his own troubled childhood and personal hardships. It analyzes how the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" argues with himself throughout the story as he commits the murder and insists that he is not mad.

2. Psychological study of tell Tale Heart
• Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai
• Roll no: 29
• Semester: 3
• Work: presentation
• Email id: vanitabaldaniya0806@gmail.com
• Date: 27/10/2015
• Submitted by: Smt. S. B. Gardy.
• Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University
Department of English

3. About Edgar Allen Poe: (1809- 1849)
Edger Allan Poe was an American
author, poet editor, can literary critic,
widely regarded as a central figure of
romanticism in the united states and
American literary as a whole.
Best known for his tales of mystery and
the macabre, Poe was one of the
earliest American Practitioners of
the short story, and it generally
considered the inverter of the
detective fiction genre.
s

4. The Fall of
House
The Gold Bug
The
Purloined
Letter
The Tell Tale
Heart
The cask of
Amontillado
His Short
Stories

5. The Tell Tale Heart
• Published in 1843.
• It is told by unnamed narrator who
endeavours to convince the reader of his
sanity, white describing a murder he
committed.
• The story is set in a house occupied by the
narrator and an old man.
• The main theme in The Tell Tale Heart is Guilt.

6. Psychological study of Poe’s short
story.
The Tell Tale Heart
o The Tell Tale Heart is famous short story written
by Edgar Allen Poe.
o The Tell Tale Heart serves a prime example of
Poe’s works displaying the elements of death and
misery that are prevalent in a majority of his
writings.
o The story’s essential characters are the narrator
and the old man, both who go unnamed.

7. Psychological aspect of narrator
Id
Ego
Superego

8.  The story circles around the narrators desire to kill
the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable
and insane. Poe’s story is a psychological tale of
inner struggles and madness.
Poe predominately wrote of the protagonist’s
battles to work out his own inner conflicts. John
Chauclaims;
“The idea of the protagonist fighting a counterpart
occurs so often in Poe’s work that critics often
suggest that the battles represent Poe’s attempts to
work out, through his own inner conflicts and
psychological struggles”.

9. • Poe’s troubles started with his own deranged
childhood. Poe was born to two travelling
actors. They both died before Poe reached
the age of two, leaving him an orphan.
• He was then adopted by a man whom he did
not get along with. Later in life he become a
writer and would get Jobs with a newspaper.
However, Poe was a drunk and could not
long.
• He was also married during this time, but
when his wife died, he was left devastated and
became depressed and suicidal.

10. • Several of his stories present these hardships
and straggles as the inner assaults of the
protagonist.
• The “ The Tell Tale Heart” presents this by
way of showing the controversy the narrator
has with himself within his own head.
• These arguments of the narrator continue
throughout the story.
• As the paper goes on, the narrator argues with
himself that he is not mad.

11. • He starts out by saying:
“True!, nervous very, very dreadfully
nervous I had been am; but why will you say
that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my
sense- not destroyed- not dulled them. Above
all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all
things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard
many things in hell. How, they am I mad?
Hearken! And observe how healthily- how
calmly I can tell you the whole story”.