The Reason Why the Sound Gets Louder and Louder In both cases this passion is symbolized by the heart that beats impossibly loudly. It is passion that drives the narrator to kill the old man and to confess. Since vultures are scavengers that eat dead things, this eye signals how central death is to the story. The narrator calls the eye a vulture’s eye. The eye represents evil while the heart represents the narrator’s guilt and conscience.

In the symbolic sense, it reflects the guilty conscience of the narrator. In the literal sense, it reflects how the sound of a beating heart makes the narrator confess his crime. The narrator thinks he hears the heart of the old man, telling the tale of his guilt, but what he really hears is his own heart, pounding with guilt. The title refers to both the narrator's heart, and to the old man's heart, and to the tales told by both.Photo: Pere/pinterest The Significance of the Title of the Story We could look at the whole story of the old man's murder as a tale told by the narrator, a tale from his own heart.

Inside the heart is where our deepest, truest feelings and emotions live, at least metaphorically speaking. So, the title also refers to the narrator's heart. Since that isn't a possibility, and since we know that dead hearts don't beat, the narrator's own hidden guilt over the deed is projected onto the dead man's heart, thus telling a tale of the narrator's guilty feelings. If it wasn't for that step, we could imagine that the old man maybe wasn't quite as dead as the narrator thought. See, this is part of why the narrator tells us he cut up the body before burying it under the floorboards. The next time we hear the beating of the heart is after the old man is dead. His heart tells a tale of fear, which in turn makes the narrator extremely angry and gives him the push he needs to carry out his dastardly deed. So, what tales does the old man's heart tell? We first hear his heart beating on the eighth night, when he realizes that something is not right in his room. In either case, tellers of tales want to keep the reader or listener paying attention, and will often resort to extreme exaggerations to achieve that goal. Tales, as you well know, are stories, and can be based on either real or imagined events. At the most obvious level, the title refers to the beating of the old man's heart.

The tell tale heart meaning