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Literary Criticism Of The Tell Tale Heart

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Edgar Allan Poe was an American gothic writer in the 1800’s. His work is the perfect archetype of macabre writing and includes many gruesome, troubled narrators. His story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is no exception. This story is a first person account of the murder of an old man as told by his caretaker. The narrator claims to love the old man, but is driven to madness by the man’s “evil eye”, which is ice blue in color with a film over it, most likely due to a medical condition. The narrator tells a vividly descriptive report of his own actions, insisting he is of right mind, but his story quickly turns into the ramblings of a true madman. This narrator is in no way reliable. It is even possible this murder never even occurred. Although the narrator …show more content…

This narrator provides extensive details about premeditating and concealing the body, but has slim details about the actual murder itself. He simply declares “the old man’s hour had come … I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room.” Then he drags the man to the floor, pulls the bed over him, and he is dead. All of this couldn’t have happened “in an instant”, like the narrator proposes. A bed heavy enough to kill a man would require more than one person to move, and would have certainly given the old man some time to escape the situation. Since the storyteller relishes so deeply in his preparations and prides himself on how cunningly he covers up this murder, why does he glaze over the actual murder? If the narrator was as plagued by this “evil eye” to commit murder, how would the actual act just get tossed under the bed, so to speak? Furthermore, this story ends with the storyteller confessing murder and telling police to tear up the floorboards, but doesn’t continue to see the body being uncovered or convicting the narrator as a criminal. It is possible that there is no body even there, and this whole crime was a hallucination, especially since he was too wary to create any bloodstains or other

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