Conscience of a Guilty Man

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Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on the 19th of January 1809 to David Poe, Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, who both died before Edgar was three. According to Fruzsina Iszaj, a Ph.D. student at the Personality and Health Psychology Doctoral Program and Zsolt Demetrovics, a Clinical Psychologist and Cultural Anthropologist who has a Ph.D. in health psychology, they both state that opium use might have played a role in Poe’s early death (1617). One of Poe’s most famous short stories and a classic of the Gothic fiction generation is "The Tell-Tale Heart" first published in 1843, in the Pioneer magazine (Shmoop). Poe takes readers into a dark tale about an unnamed narrator who tells a story who claims he is sane, but murders and old man because of his pale blue eye. Edgar Allan Poe accentuates the feeling of guilt through his obsessive behavior, point of view, vivid visual images and allegory entities.
Guilt is one of the most morally and logically powerful emotions that effect a person to pick right over wrong, good over evil. As Edgar Allan Poe writes in his story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator begins to sense an increasing uneasiness and regret for taking the life of an innocent man. Even though he is quite satisfied with his creation of an immaculate free murder, the crime subconsciously works against him and leads him to feel the guilt and finally admit to it. The officers had not suspected him or coaxed him into confessing; instead it was he, whom by his own unity, admitting to the crime. The rising guilt consumes the narrator, eating him from the inside out, and his enhanced senses blur the lines between real and imagined sound. This guilt is represented as an maddeningly cloying sound that could not b...

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...o allows the reader to feel, see and hear just how insane the narrator really is. The eye of the old man symbolizes the “evil” thoughts in the narrator’s mind that leads to the murder. The heartbeat symbolizes the “guilt” the narrator feels when he confesses to his guilty conscious. The watch symbolizes the guilt the narrator has for the time of the murder. All these elements are required in order to fully understand the narrator’s mind in his story. Readers enjoy all kinds of works, including a horrifying thriller. Poe allowed his readers in this short story to visualize and feel what the narrator felt during his plot to murder this old man he loved. Edgar Allan Poe is a great American Literature author that has put all this literary devices into his work knowing that the readers will have got into the mind of the narrator and enjoyed a great piece of history.

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