The Tell-Tale Heart
The Tell-Tale Heart
by Edgar Allan Poe

The Tell-Tale Heart Characters

Meet the Cast

The Narrator

Our narrator is such a wreck, it's hard not to feel sorry for him. He's nervous ("very dreadfully nervous"), paranoid, and physically and mentally ill. He doesn't know the difference between the "r...

The Old Man

The old man is even more of a mystery than the narrator, partly because we only see him through the narrator's skewed perspective. We know he has money (the narrator shows the old man's "treasures"...

The Three Policemen

The three policemen don't really have any characteristics. Yet, they play a major role in driving the plot of the narrator's story, so we should at least consider them. They seem to be conscientiou...

A Neighbor

The neighbor plays a small but important role in the narrator's story. As noted in the old man's "Character Analysis," the neighbor shows us that the narrator and/or the old man are alienated from...