The underlying message of the story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is to never lie, because it will come back and affect you. I chose this as the underlying message, because in the story, the narrator lies and gets caught later on. In real life, when you lie you might get caught or you might get away with it. It affects you no matter what, because if you don’t get caught, then you will sit there, dwelling on this lie. The story reads, “…The cry, I said, was my own, in a dream. The old man, I said, was away; he had gone to visit a friend in the country. I took them through the whole house, telling them to search it all, to search well” (Poe 67). This quote shows that the narrator lied about the old man being there and the cry being his own, because
