Theme Of Grotesque In The Tell Tale Heart

In Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator is so bothered by an old man’s eye that he decides to kill him. In the end, he thinks he hears the beating of the old man’s heart even after he has died, so the narrator confesses to the police. Throughout the story, the narrator keeps insisting he is sane, “but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses – not destroyed-not dulled them... How, then, am I mad?” (Poe). However, despite his constant justification of his judgment, on cannot help but question the narrator’s true sagacity.

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.

Salvador Dali once said “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.” The personality of the main character in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is that of a madman even though he is in denial about it. The narrator tries to show this through examples. Poe suggests that the main character is crazy by narrator’s claims of sanity, the narrator’s actions, and the narrator hears things that are not real.

In “The Tell Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allen Poe, the reader is presented with the short story of a madman who narrates his murder of an old man because, “he had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (Poe 105). The narrator has thought thoroughly about his plan to murder this old man, and the murderer then stashes his body underneath the floorboards. Eventually, his guilt overcomes him and he starts hallucinating that he hears the old man’s heartbeat. Ultimately, he confesses to the police about his crime after being driven to the point of insanity due to his remorse. “The Tale Tell Heart” is one of Poe’s best-known stories because he utilizes the elements of Gothic Literature to establish a disturbing sense of mystery throughout the story. Farida characterizes Gothic Literature as “the elements of fear, horror, the supernatural and darkness” (Foster 1), and Poe effectively adopts this style in many of his short story. These ominous characteristics give the story both a dark and spontaneous sequence of events that draws the reader in. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe employs several Gothic elements such as the setting, emotion, and the word choice in order to communicate an uncertain description of reality. In any case, Poe 's technique definitely holds your attention coming into the story.

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 Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a man is murdered and dismembered at the hand of an insane unnamed narrator. The narrator goes on to defend his sanity by pushing the audience question what it means to be sane. When an opportunity arises for the narrator to convince officers that all is normal, he collapses under the weight of his guilty conscious. The actions of the unnamed narrator illustrate an image of today’s society and its view of mental illnesses, but overall makes the audience question the meaning of insanity.

First, horror is developed in “The Tell Tale Heart” by the insanity of the narrator. The narrator believes he is a sane person, but contradicted himself when he kills the old man. This creates a complex in the character’s mind. When the police shows because the neighbors heard a yell, he begins to hear the old man’s heartbeat, but his guilt consumes him and he confesses to murdering the old man and putting his body underneath the floorboards. Also, in the beginning of the story, the narrator describes why he wants to kill the old man. “It was impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” (Para. 2). His insane idea of killing the old man because of his vulture eye pops into his thoughts without a preconceived notion of doing so. The murder is premeditated and thought out as each night he cracks the door open and glares the lantern directly at the vulture eye. The insanity of the narrator develops “The Tell Tale Heart” into horror.

He insists near hysterically that he is sane, all while telling the reader his impersonal tale of murdering a loved one. The narrator doesn’t comprehend the fact that murder is amoral, obssessed only with ridding the world of the old man’s eye. Hallucination and reality are one and the same for him, and he attempts to explain it away, yet the reader understands what the narrator does not say. The narrator is a puppet, his strings pulled by his own mind, whispering lies in his ear. Can one who suffers so be truly blamed for a crime, even that of murder? His thought process is impaired, pushed and prodded by illusion and paranoia. Is he not, after all, a victim as

The narrator can think of nothing else but killing the old man with which he lives even though he has nothing against this man and actually doesn’t mind him. He finds the man’s eye to be so repulsive that the only way to deal with it is by destroying the old man. The eye is described as resembling “that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The narrator also describes how this eye makes him feel when he states that “I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil that chilled the very marrow in his bones.” This startling quote helps to deepen the story’s suspense. The theme of violence is also shown when the murderer describes what he does with the old man’s body after killing him. “First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.”

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

“The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe is a fantastic short story, but how does it fit into literature? The story uses elements and techniques that delve into the gothic genre and allows the reader to be introduced to a darker reality. In “The Tell Tale Heart”, gothic elements reveal themselves in the short story through the use of setting and also through the use of characterization. These two elements are key components which demonstrate gothic features and help to classify this story as gothic literature. Murder and the supernatural elements also show that this text can be considered within the gothic genre of literature.

What’s real? What isn’t? When you’re reading this do you hear the little voice in your head helping you comprehend what is written on this page? Will that voice ever turn on you and harm you? Being watched?

Edgar Allen Poe was known for his dark-romanticism writings which evoked horror in readers. Seen specifically in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, readers are able to get into the mind of the mentally ill narrator who murders an elderly man, one whom he claimed to love. Poe created conflict in this story by having the narrator admit to loving the man and having him be his caretaker. Conflict, and the story line, is created because it makes readers question why he would commit such a heinous crime as killing and dismembering the man. Readers eventually find out that it is the elderly man’s eye that pushes the narrator to do what he does. The narrator is trying to justify his actions and prove his sanity by explaining how he observes

“The Tell Tale Heart”, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe which details the murder of an innocent old man with a “vulture” like eye that infuriates the unnamed narrator; he describes with a joyous excitement, the planning and execution of the killing as well as the hiding of the corpse in the floorboards. Poe uses literary devices such as authorial intrusion, italics, and cacophony to create a manic voice for the narrator.

Edgar Allan Poe is an American poet well-known for his eerie and gothic based themes. In fact, his tales of mystery and horror were the first to give rise to detective stories. In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), Poe invites us to experience a sinister and mystifying murder through the mind of the murderer, the narrator himself. This self-narrated tale takes place in a house that the narrator shares with an old man. The story’s focal characters are the narrator and the old man, both of whom are left nameless. It is probable that the narrator is telling the story from either prison or an insane asylum. He tries to justify his sanity; however, his actions prove otherwise. This tale revolves around the narrator 's passion to kill the old man because of his “evil eye” and the obsessed mind of the narrator who hears the beating of the dead man’s heart—solely within his own tortured imagination which causes the reader to question if the narrator is mentally sane or not. By analyzing how Poe’s early life influenced his work, I will demonstrate how Poe’s story engages readers with two widely occurring, but rarely explored elements of human experiences: a guilty conscience and the descent into madness. He takes his inner emotions to the extreme through his work and portrays the message that a guilty conscience will drive you insane. I will be analyzing how Poe’s early influences affect the