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Literary Analysis Of The Tell Tale Heart

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Among the many strange and complex short stories of Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" has come to be known as one of the most mysterious and psychologically intriguing. Poe's preoccupations with death, with madness, and with troubled human relationships all find their culmination in this brief narrative. The murder of the old man and its aftermath, which form the center of the story, are told with dazzling clarity, a clarity that itself obscures the meaning of the act and calls into question the emotional stability of the unnamed narrator. The subjectivism of this story, the confusion of the line between reader and character within the narrative, and the use of language support the claim that Poe prefigures and indeed develops many of the tropes …show more content…

These two stories mark Poe's increasing interest in and ability to portray the psychologically gruesome and the supernatural, as well as his return to poetry. The sparse plot of "The Tell-Tale Heart" concerns the "murder aforethought" of an old man, who is never named nor described fully, by the narrator, who is also never identified. Its narration is clearly retrospective but otherwise unlocated; the circumstances of the confession of this crime are never described, and so it seems that the narrator is speaking directly and passionately to the reader. The sequence of events is simple enough: the narrator is disturbed by the eye of an old man; he complains that "one of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it." The narrator decides to rid himself of this eye by killing the old man. This is accomplished after seven painstaking nights of creeping into the man's room in order to see if the offending eye is open. It is only on the eighth night that the old man opens his eyes, and the crime is committed. How the man is actually killed is not described in detail: the narrator merely

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