In the stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat", and "The Cask of Amontillado" two of the stories have unnamed narrators with one friend that has a named narrator that tell their point of view. But, many of them are unreliable narrators and we cannot always trust what they say and think of other people. Each of them have their own separate effects on the reader of the story and how the reader interprets the narrative. The difference on how the teller of the story and how the reader of the story understands it is what this passage will be talking about. We will be analyzing the effect that these narrators have on reading starting with the effect of "The Tell-Tale Heart".
In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator is a young male that is taking care of an old man by living with him as a roommate. This narrator (though is never said in the story) is suffering from a mental illness that makes him paranoid. We know that he is crazy, and he proves that by trying to deny that he is crazy in the very beginning, and then says that he can hear everything in heaven, the underworld,
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The way that handles the situation shows that Montresor follows his family motto very much which is, “No one attacks me with impunity”. He claims that he can name one thousand injuries that Fortunato has placed upon him but, once Fortunato insulted his family, he snapped. Montresor then swore revenge upon Fortunato and then took his time to plan for attack. He got the job done with extreme precision, thought, and manipulation with no flaws. This is the reason why Montresor is the only narrator out of all three stories to get away with his crime. Montresor’s actions show that he is very determined, cold, analytical, and, very vengeful when it is put to his mind. He is a reliable narrator he tells us why he did it and how he did
In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Edgar Allan Poe illustrates how obsession can quickly turn into madness and destroy its victim and those connected to them. The narrator tries to convince us that he is in full control of his thought yet he is experiencing a condition that causes him to be over sensitive. Throughout the story we can see his obsession proving his insanity. The narrator claims that he can be a bit anxious and over emotional, he is not insane. He tries to give proof this through the calmness of his tone as he tells this tale. He then explains how although he has much love for an old man who has always treated him kind, he
The readers can pick up on Montresor’s crazy and vengeful, yet cunning, character from the feelings Montresor expresses on revenge. He is clever as he executes his plan to annihilate Fortunato. Montresor treats revenge very seriously. Montresor says when he plans to get revenge he has to follow through, it is never just a threat. He feels so strongly towards revenge and so insecure that when he says something he feels he has to do it; otherwise, others will think he just issues empty threats. Although he does not want to get caught, he says the victim needs to know who is getting the revenge. It should not be small it should be planned well. “I must not only punish, but punish with impunity” (87). Throughout the whole time leading up to Fortunato's immolation, Montresor says he must make sure Fortunato does not doubt his goodness. Montresor deceives Fortunato by smiling at him and continuing to act the same, all friendly like nothing happened. Montresor takes revenge so seriously, that
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.
When Montresor is first introduced, the reader can easily identify Montresor as an unreliable narrator based on his unreasonable need to get back at Fortunato. He begins his recollection with words of exaggeration, recalling the “thousand injuries” (Poe 179) he endured, and the insult Fortunato had “ventured upon” (Poe 179). There is no further explanation on what would warrant such resentment before he quickly transitions to his definition of revenge:
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.
With a descriptive epistle of murder and insanity, “The Tell Tale Heart” threw itself into history as a classic. The narrator tells of his plot to murder an old man with a “vulture eye.” Although he sneaks into his bedroom, night after night, he still cannot murder the old man, because he loves the man, but hates the eye. When seeing the vulture eye on the eighth night, he murders the old man and dismembers his body. While insisting upon his sanity he hears the old man’s heart beating under the floorboard. Because of a neighbor’s complaint, the police show up to investigate, but he quickly quells their suspicion with his smooth talk and calmness. If the heart stopped its loud beating, the murderer would
Throughout both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” the reader is able to pick up similarities as well as differences between the narrators in both stories.
The Tell Tale Heart' is a story about a man who killed an old man just
In the heart-pounding tale “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator leaves no time to get to know the two characters but begins the story by planning the death of the old man’s eye. The
Research Essay: “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe, is a story of a nauseating death. Murder as an upshot of an eye; literally. Incongruous actions are taken by Poe when he determines the fate of a man he claims love upon, all because “He had the eye of a vulture” (Poe), and Poe plots the death of this old man. As noted in Short Story Criticism, it’s stated that; What precipitated the narrator’s insanity and the subsequent murder was his irrational obsession with the old man’s so called “Evil Eye.” The narrator freely admits to his auditors that this was his Primmum mobile: “yes, it was this!
The lesson learned in the “The Tell-Tale Heart” is, “although someone may believe that what they are doing at the time is not wrong, they do have a guilty conscience and eventually it catches up to them.” This is conveyed in the story when the narrator, whom the author portrays as a deranged person, kills an old man solely due to his evil eye, which in reality, is the result of a condition called cataract. The story begins with the narrator telling us about how he manages to watch the old man everynight waiting for the right moment to kill him. The narrator finally gets his chance, when one night the old man lies awake wondering if the noises that are drifting to his ears, are being caused only by animals. The moment the narrator shines his
Poe is fascinated by the eye, not just human eyes but eyes of all kinds. In his story “The Tell-Tale Heart” he explains his love for the old man as we not not know the name of. Poe explains that he is not into wealth and greed but art.” For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!” (Poe 1). Some people would think this in another way, but my opposition is that poe finds the eye to have many different forms of art. I mean, Have you ever taken the time to deeply detail the design and look of an eye? There are explosions of color and if you look close enough it kinda looks like a star. Poe without a doubt was not sane. That is, so we think. “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself
As I ambled along the narrow, winding path through the dense woods, I wondered again why I had agreed to this...It had been an arduous journey, and I was ready to turn back when the woods opened and there sat the dilapidated, old house we had been told about. The perfect location, or so we were told.
Edgar Allan Poe is a very famous author who is well-known for his dark and gloomy narratives. The “Tell-Tale Heart,” in particular, is a story about an old man with an unusual eye who is murdered. The narrator of the story is the killer but the identity is never revealed. It remains somewhat of a mystery. The gender of the killer is never explicitly stated. The killer of the old man could be considered a woman due to the reason they lived together, why the narrator claimed to love the old man, and why the police didn’t suspect anything when they came to the home.