Literary Elements In The Tale Tell Heart By Edger Allen Poe

A short story I have recentrly read which has an incident or moment of great tension is, "the Tell - Tale Heart," written by Edgar Allen Poe. The short story can produce many different "types" of characters. Usually, these characters are faced with situations that give us an insight into their true "character". The main character of the story is faced with a fear. He is afraid of an Old Man's Eye that lives with him. The actions that this charecter or "man" - as he is known in the story - performs in order to stop his fear can lead others to believe that he suffers from some sort of mental illness. The very fact that this man is so repulsed by the old man's eye, which he refers to as "the evil eye", is reason enough to be suspicious of

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 Allen Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" is a short story about how a murderer's conscience overtakes him and whether the narrator is insane or if he suffers from over acuteness of the senses. Poe suggests the narrator is insane by the narrator's claims of sanity, the narrator's actions bring out the narrative irony of the story, and the narrator is insane according to the definition of insanity as it applies to "The Tell Tale Heart".

“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.

Poe's economic style of writing is a key instrument in making this story amazing. In this story, he uses his style to truly bring out what he intended for the story - a study of paranoia. In example, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. 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 for ever. " it is easy to see that Poe used short sentences, to capture the rapid thoughts of a twisted mind.

1. He is not a reliable narrator because he is insane. Though he repeatedly states that he is sane, the reader suspects otherwise from his bizarre reasoning, behavior, and speech. ‘‘True—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?'' The reader realizes through Poe’s description of the narrator’s extreme nervousness that the protagonist has in fact descended into madness, as anxiety is a common symptom of insanity. He apparently suffers from some form of paranoia. Besides, the narrator claims that he loves the old man and has no motive for the murder other than his growing dislike of a cloudy film over one of the old man’s eyes. His madness becomes

This makes the narrator untrustworthy and unreliable. This also helps to illustrate Dark Romanticism’s questioning of mankind. Poe focuses on how unstable the narrator is and how the unconscious mind can destroy a man. The narrator drove himself absolutely crazy over the old man’s mysterious eyeball. He was obsessed with the eye and this caused the narrator to have extreme paranoia. The reader never finds out

“…but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed them-not dulled them” (Poe 303). This shows how he is so erratic that the so-called disease is making him act the way he is. He is blaming it on the disease and trying to convince the readers that he is actually not berserk. Another way the narrator creates fear is how much time he put in every night to stalk the old man. This is shown when Poe writes, “For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down” (Poe 304). This shows that he would stand there in the darkness for hour’s just listening to the sounds of the old man. Third, the narrator takes so much pride in how clean he did it all. “I then replaces the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye-not even his-could have detected any thing wrong” (Poe 305). One can interpret from this that the narrator was proud of his work and how stealthy he did the deed. Overall Poe uses the setting and the narrator throughout, making the story seem full of fear and dread. It’s shown from the thick darkness and safety of a home to the narrator taking his time stalking the old man and cleaning up the body in a cunning

First, the portrayal of the characters plays a fundamental role in the creation of the plot, without strong characters, the ideas might appear simple. Poe creates vivid characters which effectively assist the construction of the plot and ideas. The author depicts two main characters vividly in “The Tell Tale Heart”, the nameless narrator and the old man. The narrator tries very hard to cover his internal chaos and show that he is not insane so that he does not raise the old man suspicions. The old man with a vivid blue vulture eye that the narrator is terrified of, is believed to be the owner of the house, he is innocent and does not know the narrator’s intentions. In fact, nothing the narrator tells me about the evil eyed homeowner fits that classification, however, in the narrator’s mind it does fit his explanation as he

The author purpose of telling this story is not about murder but more like convince about his sanity. The narrator start his story by saying he is super nervous but how do they know that he’s mad. Edgar Allan Poe is saying that how do we know he’s mad if we don’t know a person’s mind or feeling. So the purpose of the authors point is to convince us that the narrator has a disorder and act normal when he’s around the old man. Next, act in strange way when the old man is not looking. Like for example he examplains in the story “The tell-tale heart” “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually”. This quote not just explains his feeling about the old man eye but his anger and madness to kill him. According to Witherington Paul hi states in his source The Accomplice in The Tell-Tale Heart explains that” The verdict of madness, however come less from the story itself than from our commonly held assumptions that all obsessive murders are mad and that their madness is easily recognizable.” This quotes to me means that madness is easy to identify by observing a person behaver or his way of thinking. At last, I do think he may have had an illness that made him want to kill the old man.

His entire drive for killing the man was to get rid of his “Evil Eye” which he despises. The narrator claims that he loved the old man and had no other reason to kill him other then his “Evil Eye.” This idea of the old man having an evil eye proves that the narrator is insane because the eye did nothing to him nor can it do anything to him yet it made his “blood run cold” (Poe 74). He tries to kill the eye but is wrong for doing so because he does not think it will harm the old man. His misunderstanding of the human body as a whole leads him to believe that the eye is a separate being from the old man.

While analyzing the old man’s eye, having a look at the quote “pale blue, with a film over it” (Poe 2), it helps to relate the connection between the eye and the narrators actions. The eye of the old man prevents him to see clearly i.e. somewhat blurry vision. ‘The Tell Tale Heart” is told by the narrator’s perspective, which has to be accounted for when opinions on the events come to discussion. However, the narrator believes that his actions of murdering the old man is based on the horrific vulture eye that the old man possesses. This connects back to the old man having blurry vision.

Started out by saying, “ And every night, around midnight, I turned the latch on his door an opened it- oh so gently!”. He also stated, “You would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in!”. And finally he stats, “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.” Those all prove that he is insane because he is taking an hour every night out of his sleep to stare at an innocent old man who’s only crime apparently was having an evil eye. Poe created the feeling of being turned mad by the old mans evil eye so badly that he decided to look upon him as he slept at night hoping to catch a glance at the old mans eye. Even more proof that we can tell he is insane is that when the cops came into this house because of a noise warning he acted like nothing happened and welcome the cops in to his house and stated that the old man living there went

Who came first? The mentally-ill person, or the man who only wrote about them? Edgar Allan Poe truly experienced the bittersweet symphony with being a writer of his caliber; he wrote with such proficiency that he often would become unable to escape the dark world, filled with the aspects of gothic literature, in which he created. He also faced numerous obstacles throughout his lifespan, which seemed to plague him by always returning right after the previous issue have been resolved. From poverty, moving around constantly, and his wife’s sporadic slowly declining health, to never being recognized as the gifted writer he truly was; Poe’s problems never seemed to disappear (Bain and Flora, 368). The pen was his shield. He habitually sought

Poe has written this story through a major character who was the killer of the old man with the “eye of a vulture.” The first person point of view makes the reader feel as though they have a personal connection to the event as it gives them an insight into the thoughts and feelings of the murderer. What makes the situation so horrific is that the narrator continues to plea his sanity whilst carrying out such an atrocious act. He tries to convince the reader how cautiously the murder was planned and how a mad person would not be capable of such precision.