How Does Poe Create Tension In The Tell Tale Heart

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Recommended: Discuss the use of symbolism in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allen Poe creates fear and dread through how he portrays the characters in the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”. A good example of a character that created fear and dread is the narrator. The narrator in the short story is very unreliable. The narrator’s unreliability adds to the fear and dread of the story. The narrator is unreliable because of the fact that he is unaware of how is mental illness is affecting him. One quote that shows this phenomenon is "TRUE! – nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses."(Poe 303). This quote shows that he believes that his illness helps him rather than hurts him. This adds to the overall fear of the story by showing …show more content…

One way that Poe achieved that is through how the narrator handled the physical conflict for him, which was the old man’s eye. The main way he dealt with the physical conflict was when he killed the old man with the bed. This enhances the atmosphere of fear by showing the narrator killing the man in such a brutal way such as killing him with the bed. Poe also adds to the atmosphere of the story by the way he writes about the narrator hiding the body and how he chopped off the limbs and hid it under the floorboards. I feel like this greatly amplifies the feeling of dread and fear he was trying to portray, because it lets the reader see that the narrator has no remorse for human life and the levels of violence he will go to. The final way Poe used physical conflict to portray fear and dread was through he descriptions of gore and violence throughout the story. The main example of this in the story comes with this quote “First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the dead and the arms and the legs… that no human eye – not even his – could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out –no stain of any kind – no blood-spot whatever.”(Poe ). The previous quote does a lot to add to the fear and dear of the story by allowing us to truly see how brutal and vicious the narrator is to the old man even after

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