Analysis paper Have you ever wondered what it would be like to hear the thoughts of a crazy killer? Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about a crazy caretaker that kills the old man he has to take care of. Poe's story contains literary elements such as sensory language, point of view, and imagery to express the feelings of the narrator and the scenes around him. The story is written in a first person point of view to show what the caretaker is thinking. This allows the reader to understand how insane the caretaker is. An example of the use of point of view can be found anywhere in the story but a part that stands out can be found in the first paragraph. “ IT’S TRUE! YES, I HAVE BEEN ILL, very ill. But why do you say that I have lost …show more content…
He uses imagery to help the reader understand what the caretaker is seeing. It is also used to enhance the use of the point of view element of the story. Poe chose this literary element because it adds depth to the action in the story. An example of this element being used would be when the caretaker is putting the body parts under the floorboards.* A quote that shows this element in use would be “ Suddenly he moved in his bed. You may think I became afraid. But no. The darkness in his room was thick and black. I knew he could not see the opening of the door. I continued to push the door, slowly, softly.”* Imagery is used in this quote to show how dark the room is and how careful the man is at opening the door. Poe also uses sensory language to show the reader what the caretaker is feeling. A quote from the story that uses sensory language is “When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up my back; even my blood became cold.”* The reader can relate to the cold chill that went through the man’s body. Poe uses this literary element to allow the reader to relate to the feelings of the caretaker, which makes them feel involved with what is happening. Another example of this is when the caretaker is describing how slowly he moves going into the old man’s
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
Many of Poe’s stories and poems can be tied to events that have happened in his life. A lot of the hard times that he had had gone through in his life he used as motivation to write his poems and stories. For example the story “The Masque of the Red Death” is thought of to be related to the consumption (aka tuberculosis), which took the life of many of the women he loved. In “The Tell Tale Heart” the dying old man good be seen as Poe’s adoptive father on his death bed, and how the old mans eye made the murderer uncomfortable could be an analogy for how Poe’s father made him feel uncomfortable because he knew that his father did not love him.
Human nature is a conglomerate perception which is the dominant liable expressed in the short story of “A Tell-Tale Heart”. Directly related, Edgar Allan Poe displays the ramifications of guilt and how it can consume oneself, as well as disclosing the nature of human defense mechanisms, all the while continuing on with displaying the labyrinth of passion and fears of humans which make a blind appearance throughout the story. A guilty conscience of one’s self is a pertinent facet of human nature that Edgar Allan Poe continually stresses throughout the story. The emotion that causes a person to choose right from wrong, good over bad is guilt, which consequently is one of the most ethically moral and methodically powerful emotion known to human nature. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe displays the narrator to be rather complacent and pompous, however, the narrator establishes what one could define as apprehension and remorse after committing murder of an innocent man. It is to believe that the narrator will never confess but as his heightened senses blur the lines between real and ...
Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" is a short story about how a murderer's conscience overtakes him and whether the narrator is insane or if he suffers from over acuteness of the senses. Poe suggests the narrator is insane by the narrator's claims of sanity, the narrator's actions bring out the narrative irony of the story, and the narrator is insane according to the definition of insanity as it applies to "The Tell Tale Heart".
Edgar Allan Poe primarily authored stories dealing with Gothic literature; the stories were often quite dreary. Poe possessed a very sorrowful view of the world and he expressed this throughout his literary works. His goal was to leave an impression with every detail that he included in his stories. Although Poe’s stories seem very wretched and lackluster they all convey a certain idea. A trademark of Poe’s is his use of very long complex sentences. For instance, in his work The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe tried to ensure that every detail was as relevant as possible by integrating a wide variety of emotion. In the third paragraph, of page two hundred ninety-seven, Poe wrote, “Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around…” This sentence illustrates the descriptiveness and complexity that Edgar Allan Poe’s works consisted of. The tormented cognizance of Poe led him to use a very gloomy diction throughout his writing. Edgar Allan Poe’s use of symbols and the way he conveyed his writing expr...
Imagine being a madman, and you hate this old guys eye. This is the issue that the main character faces in the Tell-Tale Heart. In the story, the main character wants the old man dead, However, he watches the old man for a couple days while he sleeps. The previous week before Poe killed the man he was nice. The problem is that the old man knows something is watching and he can't find the right time to kill him. He then decides to go in the room, take the bed mattress and smuggle him to death. Suspenses are within fear of the old man and what might happen. It is creepy when Poe just stares at the old man while he sleeps. Poe repeats words, uses vivid words, and shows a great amount of vivid words.
The story opens with the narrator explaining his sanity after murdering his companion. By immediately presenting the reader with the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator, Poe attempts to distort his audience’s perceptions from the beginning. This point is further emphasized by his focus on the perceived nexus of madness; the eye. Poe, through the narrator, compares the old man’s eye to the eye of a vulture. Because vultures are birds that prey on the weak and depend on their eyesight to hunt, it is easy to deduct that Poe’s intention is to connect the narrator’s guilt and his interpretation of events in his life. By equating the eye to the old man’s ability to see more than what others see, Poe allows the narrator to explore the idea that this eye can see his weakness; the evil that lies in the narrator’s heart and that which makes him unacceptable. Knowing that he is damaged makes the narrato...
Within the story The Black Cat the character that has committed awful crimes sees a white mark resembling the gallows on a cat 's chest. This shows Figurative or Deeper Meaning because of all the things that tuff of white hair on the cat 's chest represents it was the gallows which could be inferred as the character seeing his future. Finally in Poe’s work the Tell-Tale Heart he also shows Figurative or Deeper Meaning. In the story the Tell-Tale Heart the character is disgusted by an old man’s eye he refers to as to one of a vultures. Which shows Figurative or Deeper meaning because when you think of Vulture’s you think of a bird that preys and eats on dead things. And the character creeps on this old man until he kills him. Poe used Figurative or Deeper Meaning but once again it was not the only element he used. To conclude the elements that Poe used he also used Imagination. To begin with one work Poe used imagination in is the Black Cat. With in the story the Black Cat there is a character who let a cat drive him so mad he killed his wife, and then the cat gave him away to the police by hiding in the wall meowing where the character hid his wife. This shows Imagination because of the cat 's unique characteristic no one would think about a cat as manipulative as Poe made him sound in this story. Also Poe showed Imagination in the Tell-Tale Heart. The character in the Tell-Tale heart talks about how much
First off, Poe did an excellent job of hiding the physical identity of the narrator by not including a gender, name, age or even features of what the narrator looks like. Not being able to understand what the character looks like is a bit aggravating because knowing the gender you could come up with other possible motives for killing him other than his eye. The narrators relationship is never explained but we have to assume that he has some type of relationship with the old man. I think that was Poe's intention so the reader could have a complete understanding that people can commit crimes without having a reason. The narrator is not secretive when expressing his thoughts towards the old man. For example the narrator says " Object there was none. Passion there was none. I love the old man. He had never wrong me. He had never given me insult." (42 Backpack Literature). This quote was important to emphasize the point that the narrator had no real motive to kill the old man and all of his reasoning was hidden inside his head. Being secretive helps explain other ch...
Edgar’s mechanical style is evident in the way he describes the eye of the old man. He sees it as a thing that haunts his dreams. Poe shows the reader this in the descriptive way by writing, “a pale blue eye, with film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold;” (36). This passage illustrates the way the eye is not even a part of the old man.
The first example of Poe’s use of symbolism to show a deeper meaning and create excitement is in the short story, “The Raven.” Throughout the short tale, Poe presents symbolism of the conscious and subconscious mind. Abel Abu-Melhim states, “The Raven appears to symbolize loneliness, sadness, and the feeling of going insane coupled with a sense of uncertainty even about one's own self” (115). In the beginning of the story, the narrator describes a dreary December midnight. Poe uses this to describe the physical setting and show the reader the current darkness of the main character’s mind. Poe also uses the line “And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor” (688). This line shows how the narrator is slowly falling into a deeper depression, his sprit slowly fading away. The main symbol in this short story is the stately raven. The darkness of the raven is used to symbolize death, which will always haunt the narrator. The raven flies inside a...
Poe utilizes a gradual change in diction as the poem progresses. Initially, he begins the poem with melancholic diction when the narrator is falling asleep: “while I pondered, weak and weary,” “nodded, nearly napping,” and “of someone gently rapping” (1-4). The utilization of alliteration in these lines supply a song-like rhythm, which is soothing to the reader. This usage of diction conveys a mellow tone. Further into the poem, when the increasingly agitated narrator becomes vexed at the raven, he lashes out at the bird. Here, he states, “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! / Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! / Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door! / Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” (98-101). Here, his uses archaic words and phrases such as “thee,” “Night’s Plutonian shore,” and “thy soul hath”. This usage of unorthodox language creates a theatrical, dramatic, and climactic effect, which leads to an impassioned tone. By presenting both tones, Poe is able to show the contrast between the two. This transformation from a tone that is mellow to one of frustration and anxiety represents the spiraling downward of the narrator’s mental state.
As the story begins the narrator tries to convince the reader that he is not insane. This goes on throughout the story. He says he suffers from over-acuteness. “And have I not told you that what you mist...
Poe’s most famous poem begins with an imagery that immediately brings the reader into a dark, cold, and stormy night. Poe does not wish for his readers to stand on the sidelines and watch the goings on, but actually be in the library with the narrator, hearing what he hears and seeing what he sees. Using words and phrases such as “midnight dreary” and “bleak December” Poe sets the mood and tone, by wanting his readers to feel the cold night and to reach for the heat of the “dying embers” of the fireplace. You do not come into this poem thinking daffodils and sunshine, but howling winds and shadows. By using these words, Poe gives you the sense of being isolated and alone. He also contrasts this isolation, symbolized by the storm and the dark chamber, with the richness of the objects in the library. The furnished room also reminds him of the beauty of his lost Lenore. Also, Poe uses a rhythm in his beginning stanza, using “tapping”, followed by “rapping, rapping at my door”, and ending with “tapping at my chamber door.” You can almost hear the tapping on the door of the library as ...
The Tell Tale Heart is a story, on the most basic level, of conflict. There is a mental conflict within the narrator himself (assuming the narrator is male). Through obvious clues and statements, Poe alerts the reader to the mental state of the narrator, which is insanity. The insanity is described as an obsession (with the old man's eye), which in turn leads to loss of control and eventually results in violence. Ultimately, the narrator tells his story of killing his housemate. Although the narrator seems to be blatantly insane, and thinks he has freedom from guilt, the feeling of guilt over the murder is too overwhelming to bear. The narrator cannot tolerate it and eventually confesses his supposed 'perfect'; crime. People tend to think that insane persons are beyond the normal realm of reason shared by those who are in their right mind. This is not so; guilt is an emotion shared by all humans. The most demented individuals are not above the feeling of guilt and the havoc it causes to the psyche. Poe's use of setting, character, and language reveal that even an insane person feels guilt. Therein lies the theme to The Tell Tale Heart: The emotion of guilt easily, if not eventually, crashes through the seemingly unbreakable walls of insanity.