The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, A pioneer of the short story genre, whose stories typically captured themes of the macabre and included elements of the mysterious. The story was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843. It follows an unnamed narrator who murders an old man with a "vulture eye". Murder is carefully designed, and the murderer hides the body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it under the floorboards. The narrator denies having any feelings of hatred or resentment for the victim. He also denies that he killed for greed. The specific motivation for murder, the relationship between narrator and old man, and other details are left unclear. It has been speculated that the old man is a father figure, the narrator's landlord, 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.
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Edited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiance Celia tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett's achievement lies in the brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.