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Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell Tale Heart Essay

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Edgar Allan Poe, whose personal torment so powerfully informed his visionary prose and poetry, is a towering figure in the history of American literature. A Virginia gentleman and the son of itinerant actors, the heir to great fortune and a disinherited outcast, a university man who had failed to graduate, a soldier brought out of the army, a husband with an unapproachable child-bride, a brilliant editor and low salaried hack, a world renowned but impoverish author, a temperate man and uncontrollable alcoholic, a materialist who yearned for a final union with God. His fevered imagination brought him to great heights of creativity and the depths of paranoiac despair. Yet although he produced a relatively small volume of work, he …show more content…

How ironic, the same craze that led him to kill the man is the same craze that led him to his demise. The story takes place in a house around the turn of the 1800, probably in the northeastern part of the United States, and covers the period of one week and the relentless pursuit of perfect preparation the narrator went through to commit murder without getting caught. The story involves an old man, the antagonist, the police, and the protagonist, who is also the narrator, and tells the story from his point of view. On the other hand we have no idea of the relationship between the antagonist, the old man and the narrator, but what is told to us by the narrator. One tends to wander if they were related or was he simply a servant for hire and therefore cared for the old man. The narrator has left a lot to our imagination on the relationship of the characters. His insanity has made him a very paranoid man, he believes that everyone is trying to make a full of him, even thought he believed he carried out a perfect murder. He bragged about his preparation, and thought that the old suspected nothing of his plain of terror and mayhem. The narrator who is aware of what is it to be mad, but cannot bring himself to believe that he himself is insane. He believes that since he is able to recollect and present every detail of the events that took place proves that he is not insane. He believes that he is sane

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