Tell Tale Heart Analysis Essay

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Character Analysis The Tell Tale Heart and Greasy Lake have interesting characters to analyze. Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell Tale Heart has an eerie and dark tone that Poe’s literary work is known for. Greasy Lake by T.C. Boyle starts out with hardcore yet naïve teenagers looking to had a good time. However, their naivety and immaturity will led them into a very bad situation. Tell Tale Heart The setting of the story is just a random house with very little details given. One could imagine it’s an old brownstone that litters the city of Baltimore where Edgar Allen Poe lived. The narrator tells us that the old man keeps his shutters tightly locked. The narrator tells us that he was scared of robbers; this may indicate that this was a high crime neighborhood. The old mans bedroom is the only room that is mentioned in the story. The setting and tone is made scarier because the looks of the room are not described. This allows our imagination to run wild. The room is where the narrator watches the old man sleep and ends up taking his life. The tone of the story is one of dread, sadness, and nervousness. The narrator in the story is a sad, paranoid and nervous character. His life seems to not be going that well, because he is living with the old man. The story doesn’t go into why the narrator was living there, but if you have a roommate your finances may be frayed. The Tell Tale Heart is a short story that is long on imagery and symbolism. Take the old mans eye for example. The narrator describes it as a “Vulchers” eye. This conjures up an image of a vulcur circling a dying animal. The narrator is so fixated on it he mentions it three times in the story. The eyes description adds to the dreadful tone of the story as well. The narra... ... middle of paper ... ... were inflated to regulation pressure". The car being usable allowed the three “bad” guys a method to escape the situation they put themselves in. The characters have fully changed by the time the girls in the Mustang show up at the end of the story. The narrator describes the girl as having to wave her arms to keep her balance as she was obviously not sober. She approached the three friends, asked them if they had seen an Al, and after examining the destroyed car asked, "hey, you guys look like some pretty bad characters - been fightin', huh"? She then proceeded to reach in her pocket, pulling out a handful of tablets wrapped in glassine wrappers. She then asked, "hey you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah"? After the nights events the three bad characters from the beginning of the story, just wanted to go home and cower in the covers.

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