Tell Tale Heart Symbolism Essay

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.

Perhaps the biggest element in this story is the use of irony, both verbally and dramatically. For verbal irony, we can see clearly at the end that what the narrator tells the officers and how he acts on the outside, (in a "cool manner", as he puts it) is much different than the chaos on the inside, as in what he wants to say. He sees the police as "villains" and wishes them to leave, but due to the situation, he had to keep them there. The more that he assures himself of his sanity near the end of the story and the more that he thinks that he is acting coolly, eventually leads him to reveal that he is the one that killed the old man after all. As for dramatic irony, since we know that the narrator is the one that killed the old man,

Many authors often use symbolism to express a deeper meaning. They use the symbols to connect an unrelated thought or feeling into their literary work they are writing. Edgar Allan Poe frequently uses this literary device in his works. Symbols are many times seen in his poems and in his short stories. Many symbols are evident in Poe’s works “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat.” Because Poe’s works are typically dark, his use of symbols is in a dark way. Although there are many types of symbols manifested in these stories, Poe’s works generally include a symbol that eludes death or the end of something and many include references of sight and vision.

A person that brutally killed four people, and unaware of the very fact that he is the one that murdered all of them. “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King is a story that takes place at New Sharon college, at the start of strawberry spring, and the narrator tells the story about how there is a killer on the college campus, and in the end we find out he is the killer. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story from the perspective of a mentally ill woman, who is on a summer stay at a colonial mansion, and her husband makes her stay in a bedroom to treat her mental illness, however the result is compromised due to the wallpaper in the room making her feel more ill than ever before. Lastly “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar

“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe the student becomes obsessively pushing his need for self-torture to the extreme. To become more sorrow, he calls for the bird to hear only one response to become morself-tortured.

What happens when an individual descends into madness? This process is the focus of both Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain.” Both texts use many structural techniques and literary devices to draw attention to the central idea of insanity. This insanity takes the form of a deviation from what the reader would consider normal. In spite of the two authors’ drastically different writing styles, one element remains constant, the masterful use of punctuation.

In the short story of Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator talks about an insane mad man who speaks to himself. He describes what his intentions to kill an old man who he loves, but allows his emotions to overwhelm him with the thoughts that the old man’s eye in which he identifies as a vulture’s eye is invading his every emotion. He goes on to expose his every move insanely and vividly to murder the old man.

Horror is fiction that scares the audience or gives an eerie mood. Each short story develops horror is its own way. “The Tell Tale Heart” is about how an old man is murdered because of his evil vulture eye. “A Rose for Emily” is about how an old woman poisoned her lover to keep him from leaving. “The Lottery” is about how this town has a drawing to see who will be the sacrifice to the crops. Horror is developed in “The Tell Tale Heart,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “The Lottery” with many elements of horror.

In the story “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrator wants to show the reader that he is not insane. As proof, he offers a story. In the story, the initial situation is the narrator’s decision to kill the old man so that the man’s “evil” eye will stop

The Tell Tale Heart' is a story about a man who killed an old man just

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief--oh, no!--it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night . . . the terrors distracted me. (122)

The symbolism throughout “The Tell-Tale Heart” helps to increase the insanity of the already deranged narrator. The old man’s eye is an important symbol that drives the narrator to killing the elderly man. The narrator describes the eye by saying “He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. ”(Poe). It is said the eye is the window to the soul, however the old man’s eye is filmy as if covered by a vail.

Heart?. In other Poe works like ?The Raven?, Poe uses one object and tries to play upon

His madness overcomes him, and thus leads him to expose his killing to the police. The external conflict is resolved when the the narrator is tormented by the sound of the old man’s heart and jumps into his room to kill him. Alongside, there is also the conflict of man versus fate. The narrator describes the old man’s eye when he states his motive that "...it was not the old man who vexed [him], but his Evil Eye” (57).

Symbolism is to use one thing as a symbol to represent ideas. He explores the theme by using symbolism because symbolism helps the reader to understand the theme deeply also let people to imagine what will happen next. For example, “He had the eye 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.” The eye of a vulture means that the old man knows the protagonist insane and explore the theme of madness, use the eye of a vulture to show what kind of person does the protagonist looks like.