Edgar Allan Poe and the Horror Story Essay

The short story Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is a story about an insane man who lives with an old man. The insane man loves the old man, but when he sees the old man’s eye, it drives him insane and he quickly develops an obsession about the eye and becomes determined to kill the old man. He kills the man, but then police officers come. He has cleverly hidden the body under the floorboards, so they don’t find anything and start talking. He starts to hear a strange noise, and it starts driving him mad. It eventually drives him absolutely crazy and he yells and admits to the cops that he killed the old man , the body is under the floorboards and the noise was the beating of the old man’s heart,which is just the narrator’s guilt. The Tell-Tale Heart features 3 main central ideas as the story progresses. These central ideas are the madness of the

Have you ever read or heard a story that made your heart hammer, your knees grow weak, and leave you jumping at shadows? Well, Edgar Allan Poe, a mystery and horror story writer, has written some of the most descriptive and eerie murder stories that can leave you quaking. One of his most sinister works is the “Tell-Tale Heart”. Edgar Allan Poe uses time, repetition, noises, setting, and imagery to effectively create a spooky and disturbing atmosphere in his works. These aspects creates the realistically scary feeling...but how does he apply all that in his writing?

Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.

     Edgar Allan Poe, the first master of the short story, had written many short stories from mysteries to morbidity. Edgar was born on January 19,1809 in Boston, Massachussettes. Edgars Parents, David and Eliza, were both in the acting business. Poe also had a sister, who is rarely spoken of. When Edgar was young his father fleed from the family, leaving Edgar, his mother, and sister alone. At the age of two Edgar's mother died of tuberculosis. Edgar was then placed in a foster home with John and Fanny Allan.

     Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 as Edgar Poe. He was the second son to Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe. Both parents were actors, and shortly after Poe’s birth, his father deserted his family around 1810. Edgar became an orphan before the age of three years, when his mother died on December 8, 1811 in Richmond, Virginia at the age of twenty-four years. His father died at the age of twenty-seven years old. After his mother’s death, the childless couple, John and Frances Allan, took in Poe; his paternal grandparents took in brother William Henry; and foster parents cared for sister Rosalie. Allan was a strict and unemotional tobacco merchant and his wife was

Struggling with debt, David Poe turned to the drink, left his wife, and died of Tuberculosis shortly thereafter in 1811. The same year, Edgar Poe lost his mother to the same disease as his father. A wealthy Richmond family named the Allan 's took Poe in and raised him as their own (although never formally adopting him). As a young child, Poe enjoyed a spoiled life and expensive education, learning many languages and reading literature from an early age. According to his teachers and tudors, Poe excelled in literature of every kind. While living in England for five years, he looked to a schoolmate’s mother named Jane Stanton for love (Meltzer 27). Her death by tuberculosis, devastated a young Poe who became unhappy and depressed. At sixteen, Poe attended the University of Virginia where he studied the modern and ancient languages of French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin (Meltzer 34). After a year, however, Poe’s relationship with his foster parent, John Allan, had quickly decayed. Poe gambled and wasted Allan’s money while in school. After returning to his home, Poe severed ties with Allan completely by leaving the Allan home permanently while Allan promised never to finance Poe or his education again. Poe left, alone, for his birth city, Boston. The absence of loving parental figures characterized many of Poe’s future writings.

One of the many reasons Poe is still famous today is his unusual topic choices for his writing. He chose to write about such morbid subjects that usually we would not prefer to write about. One of his writings,”The Tell-Tale Heart,” describes a murder told from the killer’s point of view. Since it’s the murderer’s point of view, the reader

Edgar Allan Poe is the most morbid of all American authors. Poe made his impact in Gothic fiction, especially for the tales of the macabre of which he is so renowned for. “How can so strange & so fine a genius & so sad a life, be exprest [sic] & comprest in on line — would it not be best to say of Poe in a reverential spirit simply Requiescat in Pace [?]” — (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s reply to the Poe Memorial committee, February 18, 1876). Poe’s own life story sheds light on the darkness of his writings.

“I smiled, for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream.” The Tell Tale Heart is one of Edger Allan Poe’s most famous and creepiest stories. The premise of this gothic short story is that a man’s own insanity gives him away as a murderer. By using the narrators own thoughts as the story Poe displays the mental instability and the unique way of creating a gothic fiction. While other stories written by Poe reflect this same gothic structure and questionable sanity, this story has a unique way of making the reader walk away from the story with an uncomfortable feeling. The mental struggles the narrator faces might as well reflect the depression and other psychological issues Edgar Allan Poe was confronted with in his own life.

Poe was born to traveling actors: Elizabeth Poe and David Poe Jr. in Boston on January 19, 1809, but within three years both of his parents had died from Tuberculosis. He was then taken in by John and Frances Allan, a well-to-do Richmond, Virginia couple unable to have children of their own. John Allan was a wealthy tobacco merchant who provided Poe with a

David and Elizabeth Poe (Sr.) had seven children David, the eldest son, becoming the father of the poet. Two sisters of David, Eliza Poe (afterward Mrs. Henry Herring) and Maria Poe (later Mrs. William Clemm) enter into the story of the poet's life, the latter particularly, as she became his mother-in-law in addition to being his aunt. With her he lived from 1835 to 1849.

James Gargano, a literary critic, explains this motif when he says, “His obsession with conveying to his audience that he is sane only amplifies his lack of sanity” (Wilson 346). Gargano highlights the narrator’s insanity with the fact that the narrator tries to convince the reader he is not a madman, even though his actions and thoughts are not normal. Throughout the short story, the narrator’s obsession with attempting to persuade the reader that he is not insane shows his insanity and creates suspense and terror. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator says, “Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (para. 2). The insane act of killing the old man builds suspense and terror within the reader because they question the sanity of the narrator since he kills a man simply because he is not fond of his eye. The narrator’s actions in “The Tell-Tale Heart” reinforce the “lunacy” of the narrator and build terror internally and externally for the reader. This terror built through the “mentally ill” narrator heightens tension throughout the story and establishes suspense for the reader (Miksanek 1). The motif of insanity challenges the reader to know what will happen next to the narrator or what he might do to someone else because of

Poe was born to aspiring actors, Elizabeth and David, who passed away while he was only three.

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

Edgar Allan Poe is an American poet well-known for his eerie and gothic based themes. In fact, his tales of mystery and horror were the first to give rise to detective stories. In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), Poe invites us to experience a sinister and mystifying murder through the mind of the murderer, the narrator himself. This self-narrated tale takes place in a house that the narrator shares with an old man. The story’s focal characters are the narrator and the old man, both of whom are left nameless. It is probable that the narrator is telling the story from either prison or an insane asylum. He tries to justify his sanity; however, his actions prove otherwise. This tale revolves around the narrator 's passion to kill the old man because of his “evil eye” and the obsessed mind of the narrator who hears the beating of the dead man’s heart—solely within his own tortured imagination which causes the reader to question if the narrator is mentally sane or not. By analyzing how Poe’s early life influenced his work, I will demonstrate how Poe’s story engages readers with two widely occurring, but rarely explored elements of human experiences: a guilty conscience and the descent into madness. He takes his inner emotions to the extreme through his work and portrays the message that a guilty conscience will drive you insane. I will be analyzing how Poe’s early influences affect the