A Literary Analysis Of 'Burial In The Tell Tale Heart'

The narrator dismembers the old man’s body after making sure he was completely dead. He then proceeds to conceal his body parts underneath the floor boards and makes sure he hides all evidence from the crime. The old man’s scream from earlier caused a neighbor to report to the cops and the narrator confidently invites him to look around. He states that the screams came from him after the nightmare he had and that the old man has left after the country. Being that he was so confident that they would not find out about the murder, he provided them chairs to sit in the old man’s room, right above where his body laid and engaged in conversation with them.

After the murder of the old man, the narrator cuts his limbs apart and stuffs him underneath the floorboards. While suffocating the old man, a noise is made and is heard by the neighbors. So the next thing that is heard by the narrator is the knocking on the door by the police. The narrator plays it cool and invites them and even takes them to the room in which the old man was under. He is perfectly content with them and makes small talk until the narrator notices a pounding sound. The narrator hears a beating that 's growing louder by the second, convinced that the officers can hear it as well, he confesses to the murder of the old man. Perfectly depicting the guilty conscious of the narrator, and thus proving that a guilty conscious will always overpower.

“The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, is a petrifying short story. Poe incorporated a variety of literary elements to intimidate the reader. Personification, theme, and symbols are combined to create a suspenseful horror story.

Night after night he performed this same deed until he made a noise that woke the old man up. When he tried to shine the light on the man he saw that the eye was looking around and it was at this point the speaker finally decides to kill the man. The single ray being on the man open eye just before he is killed is symbolic in that it almost made the reader seem that there was some hope left that something good was going to happen or that maybe the speaker would not have the courage to go through with the whole deed. However, the speaker quickly dismisses this idea when he leaps for the man and murders him.

Like many of Poe's other works, the Tell-Tale Heart is a dark story. This particular one focuses on the events leading the death of an old man, and the events afterwards. That's the basics of it, but there are many deep meanings hidden in the three page short story. Poe uses techniques such as first person narrative, irony and style to pull off a believable sense of paranoia.

In the short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe uses many varying symbols, symbols that represent more than one feeling or idea. The old man’s eyes in the story are symbolic of a few things. The eyes are symbolic of how old man had a distorted view of the world which could possibly be why the narrator felt he had to kill the old man. The narrator calls the eye the “vulture eye” symbolic of the narrator’s feeling that because of the eye the man is evil (“The Tell-Tale Heart”). Kenneth Silverman says, “... eyes in Poe’s works arouse the dread of being consumed” (207). This is similar to how the narrator felt that the old man’s eye was controlling and took over its surroundings. Poe also portrays a blindness symbolized

The narrator’s relationship with the elderly man is never disclosed in the story. What is known is that he feared the man’s “vulture eye”. It is describe as pale blue with a film over it. The narrator states that “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold…” Due to this discomfort, the narrator believes the only rational solution to this problem is by killing the old man. His actions demonstrate the possibility that the narrator suffered from some variation of mental illness. In addition, the narrator tends to repeatedly tell readers that he isn’t mad. He doesn’t believe that any of his actions in the story make him mad. The narrator acts in a wisely but, cautious manner as he carries out the stalking and eventual murder of this poor old man, something in which he

Moreover, he tries to defend his sanity by explaining how wise and cautious he was as he was preparing for the murder. Every night he checked on the old man to make sure he got everything right and get ready to execute his plan. The narration lacks of a concrete explanation of the person or place to which it is addressed, which leaves much room for interpretation for the readers. What we can infer from the story is it is not addressed to the police officers since the narrator says he was successful in making them satisfied. Finally, the climax of the story comes as the revelation of the dead body hidden under the planks. Because the story is told as a memento, our estimation might be that the narrator is addressing a court official or personage who may influence over the judgment of the narrator. Therefore, the story that the narrator is telling is most accurately realized as an appeal for mercy rather than just being an appeal to be thought sane.

Poe's narrator in The Tell-tale Heart exhibits all of these as he blurts out a confession to avoid his fear that the old man is buried alive and will alert the authorities, "'Villains!' I shrieked, 'dissemble no more!  I admit the deed!-tear up the planks!-here, here!-it is the beating of his hideous heart'" (Poe, 1966, 124).  We see that the man is not buried alive but the narrator's phobia of it is apparent.

The choice of language and themes in these two stories are influenced by the historical context during which the works were written. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” emphasizes on the ‘so-called faithful’ as hypocrites and liars that tainted the religious belief in the mid-20th Century. “The Tell-Tale Heart” on the other hand contains themes on madness, superstition, and elements of guilt, which trace their origin to the American Gothic Literature that existed in the early 19th Century.

First, horror is developed in “The Tell Tale Heart” by the insanity of the narrator. The narrator believes he is a sane person, but contradicted himself when he kills the old man. This creates a complex in the character’s mind. When the police shows because the neighbors heard a yell, he begins to hear the old man’s heartbeat, but his guilt consumes him and he confesses to murdering the old man and putting his body underneath the floorboards. Also, in the beginning of the story, the narrator describes why he wants to kill the old man. “It was impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” (Para. 2). His insane idea of killing the old man because of his vulture eye pops into his thoughts without a preconceived notion of doing so. The murder is premeditated and thought out as each night he cracks the door open and glares the lantern directly at the vulture eye. The insanity of the narrator develops “The Tell Tale Heart” into horror.

Rather it is the old man’s that is so unsettling. Any time the eye looked upon him his. It is that eye by which he is consumed and that eye that sends him into madness. It pushes him to wish to never have to look upon, or be looked upon by, that eye again. His solution, in what seems a rational choice to him, is to kill the old man. With a similar precision as the Montresor took in “The Cask of Amontillado”, the man in “The Tell-Tale Heart” has devoted himself to the perfect method to dispatch the old man.

While in the room where the old man was is buried, the narrator is sitting on a chair, which is above where the old man’s body parts are. He engages in conversation with the policemen. In the narrators mind, he starts to feel guilty his anxiety rises. He believes he starts to hear the old

Edgar Allen Poe was known for his dark-romanticism writings which evoked horror in readers. Seen specifically in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, readers are able to get into the mind of the mentally ill narrator who murders an elderly man, one whom he claimed to love. Poe created conflict in this story by having the narrator admit to loving the man and having him be his caretaker. Conflict, and the story line, is created because it makes readers question why he would commit such a heinous crime as killing and dismembering the man. Readers eventually find out that it is the elderly man’s eye that pushes the narrator to do what he does. The narrator is trying to justify his actions and prove his sanity by explaining how he observes

The Scarlet Letter, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, depicts a woman ostracized from her town in Puritan New England after her sin of adultery is revealed, although the father of the illegitimate child remains unknown to the town. In The Tell-Tale Heart, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator murders an elderly man in the middle of the night and attempts to cover up his crime. Hawthorne and Poe use the psychological torment and suffering of Arthur Dimmesdale and the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart to convey that hiding one’s sinful actions from society leads to the strong emotions of pain and guilt, demonstrating that one can only end their misery, leading to freedom, by accepting and exposing their mistakes to society.