The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Published 1958 · 8,250 words · about 1 hour at an average pace
How hard is The Tell-Tale Heart to read?
The Tell-Tale Heart scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Elevated but not obscure; the effect comes from rhythm rather than rare words.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Short, broken, exclamatory sentences that mimic a racing pulse.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Wholly concrete — a room, an eye, a floorboard.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A few pages, one event, little information.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- The narrator insists on his sanity while demonstrating the opposite; nothing he says can be taken at face value.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The eye and the heartbeat carry the whole weight of meaning.
- Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
- The gap between what the narrator claims and what the reader sees is the entire story.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The confession resolves the plot completely.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- A single linear confession.
How The Tell-Tale Heart is regarded
The Tell-Tale Heart holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.