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The Tell Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

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“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. To begin, by using the perspective of third person Poe creates an insight into the brain of a murderer and quite possibly the mind of a psychopath. There are many arguments to be made that the main character is mentally ill. The first of these being his reasoning behind killing the old man. “…I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.” It can be interpreted that the narrator killed this old man because of the hate of the way one of his eyes looked. While many of us can relate to the uncomfortable feeling an odd looking facial feature or limb can make us feel, the idea of killing because of this abnormal

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