SOURCE: "Death and Its Moments: The End of the Reader in History," Modern Language Notes, Vol. 112, No. 5, December, 1997, pp. 836-75.
In the following essay, Pillai considers "The Tell-Tale Heart" as a text that expresses a complicity between the fictional narrator and the reader of the narrative, and a breach in the conventional border between literature and criticism; this breach results in what Pillai calls a narrative's "afterlife. "
