In the end of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale
Heart," readers should leave with one message or moral: that murder is
wrong.
Given that a moral is the relating of behavior in
regards to right and wrong, the speaker, alone, simply cannot come to terms with what he
has done. That being said, while the beating is understood by the speaker as the heart
of the old man, readers know that it is, instead, his own heart beating in his
ears.
While the speaker does not come to understand that
the sounds he is hearing is his conscious bearing down on him, the fact that he does not
allow the police to leave without admitting to the murder of the old man speaks more
profoundly to the morality lesson.
Therefore, it is not the
typical moral story. The speaker does not come out of the story enlightened. More
importantly, the reader does.
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