Analysis Of The Tell Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Have you ever read or heard a story that made your heart hammer, your knees grow weak, and leave you jumping at shadows? Well, Edgar Allan Poe, a mystery and horror story writer, has written some of the most descriptive and eerie murder stories that can leave you quaking. One of his most sinister works is the “Tell-Tale Heart”. Edgar Allan Poe uses time, repetition, noises, setting, and imagery to effectively create a spooky and disturbing atmosphere in his works. These aspects creates the realistically scary feeling...but how does he apply all that in his writing?

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.

Poe builds the suspenseful mood through threatening details. For example, “There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honor of the time. I told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house.” He wanted to make sure that there were no witnesses. This describes Montresor’s actions while preparing for the murder. A second example is that Montresor’s arms motto is “Nemo me impune lacessit” (Poe 64), which is Latin for “No one attacks me with impunity.” The motto is essentially stating that if he is attacked, he will harm his attacker. Fortunato had mentally abused Montresor, so he kills him. Another example is “In pace requiescat!” (Poe 68), meaning “May he rest in peace!” Montresor says this after Fortunato’s annihilation. These alarming details help add to the mood.

Edgar Allan Poe said “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Throughout his short stories; “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe sets up his characters to subconsciously reveal their insanity. Often using syntax clues and patterns, Poe shows the madness of the narrators of his short stories. The constant theme of denial of insanity further convinces the reader of the character’s psychosis. Characters themselves often prove they are not in touch with reality through their actions. Through syntax, denial of insanity, and character’s actions, Poe allows his narrators in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” to reveal their own insanity.

Feuds and arguments between individuals who may disagree with or dislike one another are a common occurrence in everyday life, often varying in degrees of intensity, but rarely reaching a point of extremity. However, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado”, This threshold of extremity is reached by the narrator of the story, Montresor, who explains that his acquaintance, Fortunato, has repeatedly and irreparably insulted him over the course of years, and uses it as justification to take justice into his own hands and seek retribution through murder, despite there being no proof of Fortunato's guilt other than Montresor’s claims. His motive for murdering Fortunato can be attributed to his state of mind, as Montresor’s lack of guilt, empathy, or remorse highlights him as a character with psychopathic tendencies. As the story progresses, Montresor’s cold and calculating nature leaves the audience full of dread and suspense while he lures the oblivious Fortunato towards his inevitable demise. The employment of rhetorical devices such as irony, theme, and structure builds the suspense for the ultimate climax of Poe’s gothic masterpiece.

A virtuoso of suspense and horror, Edgar Allan Poe is known for his Gothic writing style. His style is created through his use of punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, tone, and figurative language. Punctuation-wise; dashes, exclamation marks, semicolons, and commas are a favorite of Poe. His sentences vary greatly; their structures are influenced by punctuation. Much of his word choice set the tone of his works. Figurative language colors his writings with description. Such is observed in the similarities between two of his most well-known short stories, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”

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

First, Poe uses emotionally and mentally flawed characters to create a tone of fear and terror that is seeded throughout the whole story, wherever the characters go. Fortunato, a comically prideful and gullible person, contrasts Montresor, a villain protagonist, who recollects the story of a supposedly perfect revenge--on Fortunato. At the beginning of the story, Montresor tells Fortunato that he “‘has received a pipe of what passes for

“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” (Poe 92.) Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, “The Tell- Tale Heart,” is not only a story of the murder of an old man, but at closer analysis, it speaks of a sadomasochistic motive behind the crime. Hollie Pritchard’s criticism of the story helps to evaluate various aspects of this piece of literature, giving a deeper, darker meaning behind Poe’s words. The first person narrator of the tale is convinced that he is not mad, or mentally ill.

Poe uses strong characterization of the story’s protagonist, Montresor, to convey the theme of the story. In the beginning, Montresor is portrayed as a victim to the injuries and insults of another character, Fortunato. The first line of the story is a good

The central theme of the short story “The Tale-Tell Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is that every person who committed a crime can’t escape the punishment. The thematic subjects are guilt,innocence and the fear of mortality. The sound of the beating heart is interpreted as the narrator’s guilt conscious reminding him of his deed. The narrator finally confesses his crime at the end of the story because his guilt grows so great that he can no longer hold it in. However, this reading of his confession is incongruous with his character. At the beginning of the story, the narrator disassociates himself from the crime, claiming that an invisible force acted on him. The narrator’s insistence that he is sane and the old man’s eye is at fault suggests that the narrator does not regret his action; he blames the murder on external forces that he could not control. Another reading of the story claims that the narrator kills the old man and confesses because of his own fear of mortality. The way in which he describes the “vulture-eye” and the old man suggests his fixation on the man’s age and frailty. He hears death -beetles” in the walls and appears obsessed with time. Once he murders the old man, time seems to stop for him as he loses track of it. He conflates hours and stops focusing on the ticking of clocks. Then, the narrator begins to feel physical symptoms of disease. He grows weak and infirm. At this point, the police come to the house, and the sound of the

What honestly makes a novel gothic? Is it the madness, the horror or the secrets hidden in the story line that does it? Individually when each of you close your eyes and visualise a book that has been flicked by hundreds and has been adored what comes to mind? The famous Edgar Allan Poe stands out in the history of gothic texts, especially his novel the “ Tell-Tale Heart”. However there is a numerous amount of contemporary texts based off this genre including Tim Burton’s “ Vincent”. In this presentation I hope to engage you in the history of the gothic genre.

Edgar Allan Poe, a prominent poet and writer in the 1800s, is known for his unique narration style. Through sentence structure and diction Poe creates a sensory reaction in his readers; for example, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the readers feel the panic of the narrator as the sentences get shorter and choppier. Poe’s methods of influencing the reader’s emotions are not just limited to these practices. In his stories of mystery and macabre Edgar Allan Poe has developed many unique characters with definitive traits who navigate their way through the author’s intriguing plots and storylines. These writing methods are applied to Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, in which the author establishes the story through a peripheral narrator, maintains the characterization of his protagonist, and utilizes diction unique to each aspect of the story. Poe’s decisions create a mysterious suspense for the reader as the story unfolds.

Edgar Allan Poe, whose personal torment so powerfully informed his visionary prose and poetry, is a towering figure in the history of American literature. A Virginia gentleman and the son of itinerant actors, the heir to great fortune and a disinherited outcast, a university man who had failed to graduate, a soldier brought out of the army, a husband with an unapproachable child-bride, a brilliant editor and low salaried hack, a world renowned but impoverish author, a temperate man and uncontrollable alcoholic, a materialist who yearned for a final union with God.

The Scarlet Letter, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, depicts a woman ostracized from her town in Puritan New England after her sin of adultery is revealed, although the father of the illegitimate child remains unknown to the town. In The Tell-Tale Heart, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator murders an elderly man in the middle of the night and attempts to cover up his crime. Hawthorne and Poe use the psychological torment and suffering of Arthur Dimmesdale and the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart to convey that hiding one’s sinful actions from society leads to the strong emotions of pain and guilt, demonstrating that one can only end their misery, leading to freedom, by accepting and exposing their mistakes to society.