Overview

Students engage with “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe (1843) in order to determine narrator reliability, and use alternate texts to begin to differentiate between reliable texts and unreliable texts. Students annotate the text, isolating literary cues and tropes for unreliability in more complex literary texts. They also use heuristics (following plot, characters, symbolism, unusual things, character map, and unreliability) in order to promote comprehension of the text. Finally, they develop an argument of judgment regarding the reliability of the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart.”

Guiding Questions

  • What makes a character unreliable? What makes a narrator unreliable?
  • How do you know when someone (character or narrator) is telling the truth?
  • What does the truth telling of the character say about him/her (in terms of an individual, his/her world-view and human-nature)?

Texts/Materials

Activities

1. Instruct students to consider the following question and do a five-minute quick write:

  • Are people that suffer from mental illness reliable?

In order to have a common definition, you can define mental illness as a medical condition that disrupts a person’s thinking or feeling, mood or ability to relate to others and perform daily functioning. After writing students can discuss in small groups.

2. Ask students to read and annotate the lyrics to “Stan” by Eminem, being mindful of the difference between narrator and character. Ask them to determine who is narrating and who is the character in the song. Then they can discuss their reliability in pairs.

3. Provide students with brief biographical information on Edgar Allen Poe. Give students “The Tell Tale Heart.” Have students read the text slowly as it is challenging, and there are multiple vocabulary words that may require attention. Students should have access to a dictionary. They can annotate to document their thinking, ask questions, react, clarify, and dialogue with the text. Also, provide students with the heuristics sheets to fill out as they read.

4. Have students share their annotations and worksheet with a partner. Then, have students share out and discuss as a whole class, particularly focusing on issues around the reliability of the narrator.

5. If students have access to iPoe, have them independently examine the app. The teacher should facilitate around the room, asking students to share the ways in which the app is functioning differently than the text version of the story. The teacher can ask guiding questions as a means to encourage students to draw comparisons between the visuals they created in their mind as they read the text versus the visuals created by the app designer.

6. After annotating, gathering evidence, and examining the story through multiple avenues of exploration, it’s important to have the ability to transfer that thinking to a compelling piece of writing. Students should draft an essay, responding to the
following:

  • Is the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” reliable? Defend your answer with textual evidence and be sure to explain why the narrator acts the way he does. What does this say about his world? What does this say about our world?

Students should have an additional opportunity to complete a final draft, after the teacher has examined the essays and provided feedback/conferences to individuals.

Assessment

The following are means of assessing students during activities so instruction can be adjusted and differentiated according to students’ needs.

  • Completion of quick write/annotation of “Stan” by Eminem
  • Annotation of “The Tell Tale Heart”
  • Completion of Heuristics for comprehension
  • Completion of argument of judgment regarding reliability of narrator