Edgar Allan Poe, whose personal torments so powerfully informed his visionary prose and poetry, is a towering figure in the history of American literature. A Virginia gentleman and the son of itinerant actors, the heir to a great fortune and a disinherited outcast, an academic who failed to graduate, a discharged soldier, a husband with a child- inaccessible wife, a brilliant editor and low-wage hacker, a world-famous but impoverished author, a sober man and an uncontrollable alcoholic, a materialist who longed for permanent union with God. His fevered imagination took him to great heights of creativity and depths of paranoid despair. Yet although he produced a relatively small volume of work, he virtually invented the horror and detective genres and his literary legacy endures to this day. In Tell Tale Heart, the main character, the narrator, has a problem with an old man, the antagonist. , with whom he lives. The strange thing is that the problem has nothing to do with the old man, his behavior, or even his attitude towards the narrator. It is simply one of the eyes of the old man who is blind or cannot see one hundred percent in one eye. The narrator's description of the eye is that it looked like a vulture's, pale blue with film on it. When the narrator looked at him, his blood ran cold. This made him mad and caused him to kill the old man. He begins to believe that he hears the old man's heart beating, both while he was killing him and after his death. The blows become stronger and stronger and drive him crazy. This forces him to tell the police, who search his house, that he killed the old man and showed them where the body is buried, which is most...... middle of paper .... .. sense of hearing and the police's refusal to come out, his fear of being arrested makes his heart rate increase. As the sound got louder and louder, he became uneven and suspected that the policeman had heard the sound and decided to overlook it, because they were laughing at how horrible it was. To him, anything was better than enduring the agony and pain of the pounding heartbeat. Eventually, his conscience led him to admit his crime. The story tries to tell many stories, but the one point I took away from the story is that you shouldn't hate or dislike someone just because of their appearance. I have sometimes wondered why racism exists and the story paints a clear picture of the madness that goes on in the minds of racist individuals. Simply wanting to kill a human being, just because of their appearance, is insane, no matter how people try to rationalize it...