Read the excerpt from "The Tell-Tale Heart.”Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief—oh, no!—it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not.
The passage repeatedly describes fear: the old man makes a sound of “mortal terror,” and his fears keep growing as he lies awake. The narrator also recalls experiencing similar terror himself. These details make “terror and fear” the best answer, rather than an upbeat ending, an unsolved mystery, or the general subject of life and death.
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