Setting Analysis

Usually in the case with first-person narratives, there are multiple settings to the story. The action of the tale takes place in the house the narrator shares with the old man which seemed to be very comforting and a big house. At the same time, the narrator is telling the story from either a prison or an insane asylum where he has been incarcerated. But even more importantly, the setting is actually inside the obsessed mind of the narrator himself, for the crucial climactic event of the story, which is his hearing the beating of the dead man's heart and takes place solely within his own tortured imagination.