Introduction
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
This WebQuest will address short story elements, a unique rewrite of the story, multi-modal assignments, and a presentation.
For this project you will be reading the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" and interacting with this text. You will also be discussing the video that you watched prior to this Webquest.
Do not hesitate to ask questions and be ready to work!
"The Tell-Tale Heart" follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a "vulture eye". The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by dismembering it and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards.
It is unclear what relationship, if any, the old man and his murderer share. It has been suggested that the old man is a father figure, or that the narrator works for the old man as a servant, and that perhaps his vulture eye represents some sort of veiled secret, or power. The ambiguity and lack of details about the two main characters stand in stark contrast to the specific plot details leading up to the murder.
"The Tell-Tale Heart" was first published in 1843 and is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and one of Poe's most famous short stories.