The Tell Tale Heart Analysis

In the story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, The author puts a lot of emphasis on the heart. But what can we infer about the heart? In the story Poe’s character claims to the audience that he was very nervous about the situation but was not insane. He claimed to have a ‘disease’ that made his hearing extra sensitive.  Every night the narrator suspiciously stalks this old man who has this mysterious blue eye with a film over it. The narrator soon feels entrapped by this eye and decides to kill the old man to be set free.

As highlighted by several symbols throughout the story, the most prevalent theme in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of ascending guilt and paranoia. The only information that the audience of this tale has about the narrator is what each can gather from the details of the story. The narrator constantly pleads with his listeners that he is not insane. However, through several symbols, the true deranged mental state of the narrator shines forth. Suffocating a man simply because of a cataract or a similar medical condition is unreasonable to the average person, however, is the reasoning behind the narrator’s crime. Through personifying the eye and persuading the audience to believe that it is as evil as he believes, the narrator uses imagery to strengthen his case. Edgar Allen Poe, through this unreliable madman of a narrator, paints a picture of paranoia, murder, and guilt through imagery.

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.

In the short story “Tell-Tale Heart” written by Edgar Allan Poe, there are two main characters- the narrator (perceived as insane) and the Old Man (perceived as innocent). The narrator is disturbed by the Old Man’s “vulture eye” and therefore murders him. After the murder, the narrator dismembers the Old Man and buries him under the floorboard. When the intrepid narrator is questioned by the police of a scream a neighbor overheard, the narrator courageously invited the officers in. During the duration of the officer’s stay, the narrator begins to hear the heart he or she has buried under the floorboard; the escalating sound of the heartbeat causes the narrator to ultimately confess to the murder of the Old Man. Poe uses various literary devices to portray the narrator’s insanity in the short story “Tell-Tale Heart.”

All throughout Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” the reader follows along as the narrator explains the eight days where he plotted against the old man. During this explanation, the readers forms an opinion on if the narrator is a calculated killer or mentally insane. It is understandable why some people might think that the narrator is a calculated killer because of the planning that the narrator mentions. However, there are more scenes where the narrator can be interpreted as being mentally insane. Therefore, the narrator is better described as mentally insane because he can “hear” the heartbeat of the old man and he acted upon impulse when he killed the old man.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe depicts a gruesome tale. His use of dark imagery and harsh words make this story an unmistakable product of the Dark Romantic period. Poe’s use of the first person narrator adds an important dimension to the story. The narrator’s thoughts are eating him alive and Poe clearly portrays this to readers by repeating words and having the narrator constantly question himself:

1.Why do you think Poe has set his story at night time, in the night?

“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.

Explain the term ‘unreliable narrator’. How does this point of view complicate the plot in Poe’s, "The Tell-Tale heart"? An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised whether it be in literature, film or theatre. Such as providing faulty, misleading or distorted details. The narrator in this short story is the killer. We really do not get the opportunity to really know the killer such as his name and what his motive is in killing the old man. What we do learn is he displays no guilt and he is not “mad”. He also appears to be proud of what he has done. The killer is very nonchalant in telling how he killed the old man and the reasoning behind doing so has to do with

Poe is not only famous for featuring dark themes such as death and murder, he also alludes traditional Gothic elements of madness and helplessness through his psychologically unstable characters and macabre events. The paranoid, fixated, and mad narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is obsessed with his plan to

This is the case in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story in which the narrator describes to the reader his

"A pale blue eye. With film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so be degrees--- very gradually--- I made up my mind to take the life of the old man thus rid myself of the eye forever.

“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” (Poe 92.) Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, “The Tell- Tale Heart,” is not only a story of the murder of an old man, but at closer analysis, it speaks of a sadomasochistic motive behind the crime. Hollie Pritchard’s criticism of the story helps to evaluate various aspects of this piece of literature, giving a deeper, darker meaning behind Poe’s words. The first person narrator of the tale is convinced that he is not mad, or mentally ill.

In the story The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, a variety of central ideas are presented. The three most prominent ones are madness, obsession, and guilt. These ideas are developed in many different ways, purposely put in to give the reader a sense of suspense. Through use of repetition, punctuation, timing and pacing, Poe builds up the central ideas in very creative ways. Although these central ideas have similarities in the way they are built up, they use these different writing tools in different ways to do so.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story about an unnamed narrator that is dreadfully nervous, yet mad. The narrator murder’s an old man with a “vulture eye” that drives the narrator’s blood cold. Although, Poe persuades the narrator that he is sane, there is textual evidence that shows he is crazy. Edgar Allan Poe uses irony, symbolism, and imagery to prove that the narrator is truly insane.