Short Stories About Guilt: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about guilt, from The Tell-Tale Heart and Markheim to God Sees the Truth, But Waits and An Honest Thief, summarised and compared.
Guilt is the one emotion that narrates itself. A guilty person rehearses, justifies, confesses to strangers, and the writers here simply hand them the pen. Readers come to these stories to hear a mind arguing with itself and losing.
The collection starts with Poe's confessors, moves to the murderers who meet their conscience in person, and closes with the innocents who carry someone else's guilt. Each title links to a page where the story is summarised and its ending explained.
The stories
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. A narrator who insists he is not mad describes killing an old man because of his eye and hiding the body under the floorboards. When the police come he pulls up a chair over the spot.
The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. A once gentle man, ruined by drink, blinds and hangs his cat, and a second cat appears with a white mark that slowly takes the shape of a gallows. What he walls up in the cellar does not stay quiet.
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson. Markheim kills an antique dealer on Christmas afternoon and, alone in the shop among the ticking clocks, is joined by a visitor who knows everything about him. Their conversation is the story, and it ends with Markheim ringing for the maid.
The Minister's Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Reverend Hooper walks to church one Sunday with a piece of black crape over his face and never removes it, not for his wedding sermons, not for his fiancee. On his deathbed he tells the watchers what he sees on their faces.
God Sees the Truth, But Waits by Leo Tolstoy. Aksionov, a merchant convicted of a murder he did not commit, spends twenty-six years in Siberia and becomes the prison's holy man. Then the real killer arrives in the same camp and starts digging a tunnel.
An Honest Thief by Fyodor Dostoevsky. An old soldier tells of a drunk lodger, Emelyan, who stole his breeches to sell for drink and then could not live with it. The confession comes on a deathbed, over the question of where the breeches went.
The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson. Fettes, a medical student in Edinburgh, takes delivery of corpses for an anatomy school and one night recognises the face of a man he drank with the day before. Years later a body dug from a country churchyard changes in the gig on the way home.
The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty. A Republican sniper on a Dublin roof kills the man opposite and then, shaken, crosses to look at him. The face is the story's last word.
William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe. A man is shadowed from school onward by a double with his own name who whispers warnings at the worst moments and exposes his cheating at cards. He finally corners the double at a Rome masquerade with a sword and a mirror.
The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad. A new captain, alone on deck at night in the Gulf of Siam, finds a naked swimmer at the ladder who has killed a man on another ship. He hides him in his cabin, and the two become mirror images for the rest of the voyage.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that guilt needs a listener, and the writers supply one: the police in Poe, the stranger in Markheim, the whole congregation in Hawthorne, a fellow convict in Tolstoy. When the listener is refused, as in The Black Cat, the guilt finds a voice of its own. Dostoevsky's Emelyan and Tolstoy's Aksionov make a pair: one man destroyed by a theft nobody minded, one preserved through a crime he never committed.
Conrad's captain is the odd one, guilty of nothing and yet behaving exactly like the others, hiding a body in a cabin and lying to his officers. The story suggests guilt is contagious.
If you want to write about guilt
What writers can take from this
- Read the two Poe confessions back to back; they are the same voice at two stages of collapse.
- Markheim and God Sees the Truth are both Christmas or Easter stories at heart; notice how the holiday sharpens the crime.
- An Honest Thief is easy to overlook; give it a slow reading and watch how the frame narrator changes.
- In The Body Snatcher, mark the moment Fettes decides to keep quiet, and everything after follows from it.
- The Secret Sharer is long for a story; read it in one sitting so the doubling holds.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character confesses to the wrong person a crime that was never discovered, and the person's calm reaction is worse than any punishment.
Questions
What is the best short story about guilt?
The Tell-Tale Heart is the most read, and Markheim the most admired by writers for its debate structure. God Sees the Truth, But Waits is the one most often called wise.
Which short stories about guilt are good for students?
The Tell-Tale Heart, The Sniper, God Sees the Truth, But Waits and An Honest Thief are short and generate real disagreement. The Minister's Black Veil is the standard for symbolism essays.
Which classic story about guilt is the shortest?
The Sniper, at about fifteen hundred words, then The Tell-Tale Heart at just over two thousand.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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