In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator imagines that he hears the sound of a beating heart throughout the story. The heart sounds like a watch muffled or enveloped in cloth; it is a steady ticking that only the narrator believes he hears. At the start of the story, the narrator states that his senses are heightened, especially his hearing. This justifies his belief that he can hear a heart beating.
At first, he thinks it is the old man's heart but after he kills and dismembers the old man, he believes he can still hear the heart beating under the floorboards of the house. When the police are interrogating him, the sound of the beating heart drives him crazy and he confesses to the crime. Of course he could not hear the heartbeat--it was the sound of his guilty conscience. Poe uses the heart beating as a symbol to represent guilt in this story.
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