Afraid that the neighbors might hear the noise, the narrator suddenly opens the lantern all the way and jumps into the room. The murderer continues waiting, shining the light onto the eye, while the heartbeat grows progressively louder. The narrator believes that at this moment the old man’s heartbeat becomes audible, like the ticking of a watch “enveloped in cotton” (Paragraph 11). Upon hearing a sound like a groan of fear, the narrator imagines with relish how the old man experiences his fear.įinally, the murderer opens the lantern so a very small ray of light illuminates the open evil eye. The two men remain in a stalemate for an hour, the narrator waiting and reveling in their knowledge, the old man trying but failing to calm himself. The old man asks who is there, but the narrator remains silent, enjoying a sense of power over the other man.

The murderer does not withdraw, as it is completely dark in the room and they remain invisible. On the eighth night, the narrator’s actions wake the old man up. Since the narrator hates the eye, not the man, they keep postponing the terrible deed. The murderer calls it an “Evil Eye” and is obsessed with getting rid of it (Paragraph 4), despite claiming they loved the old man, who never mistreated them.īefore committing the murder, seven nights in a row, at midnight, the narrator cautiously and slowly opens the door to the man’s bedroom and shines a single ray of light on his sleeping eye, which remains closed each night. The narrator confesses to feeling compelled to commit murder by the old man’s single “pale blue eye,” the eye of a “vulture” with a white film over it (Paragraph 2). The confession is meant to convince the unknown interlocutor of the criminal’s sanity, but it has the opposite effect. The narrator’s age and gender, and their relationship to the victim, are unclear. The unnamed narrator begins by addressing an unknown interlocutor directly, confessing to the murder of an old man in whose house the narrator used to live. The epigraph was removed from later editions due to Poe’s repeated accusations of plagiarism against Longfellow. Originally, the story included an epigraph with a stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life,” subtitled “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist”:Īrt is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

The heart edgar allan poe