Mental Challenges in The Tell-Tale Heart Essay

“The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, is a petrifying short story. Poe incorporated a variety of literary elements to intimidate the reader. Personification, theme, and symbols are combined to create a suspenseful horror story.

The short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" written by Edgar Allan Poe engages readers through the use of a distressed narrator, imagery and word repetition.

Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer, wrote many short stories in his lifetime. One of those stories is “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In “The Tell-Tale Heart, “ a person murders an old man because of his eye. Poe has also written “Hop-Frog,” where a king’s jester murders the king and his seven ministers as revenge for striking his friend. In both stories, Poe uses narrative elements to develop a narrative point of view. He develops a third person objective point of view in “Hop-Frog,” and develops a first person point of view in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe uses syntax and imagery to develop a point of view in both stories, but uses repetition and metaphors for one story and allusions and sarcasm for the other.

The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night thinking there is someone in your bedroom while you are sleeping. Do you turn a light on? Do you forget about it and go back to sleep? In The Tell Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe creates fear and dread through the use of characters, sound effects, and violence. The narrator of this story has an obsession with an old man’s vulture-looking eye, and his long nights of stalking the old man helps us understand Poe’s intentions of fear and dread in this story.

In ‘The Telltale Heart,’ Edgar Allan Poe uses characterisation, theme and horror tropes to reinforce the theme of power. Poe illustrates this theme through highlighting the effect fear has on dominance, creating an inhumanely skilful killer through characterisation and even taking the narrator’s power out of the story and influencing the reader’s emotions. While initially it appears that the Narrator was not above the old man, potentially even working for him this situation changes drastically as the story progresses. Poe was a master of utilising story elements to bring his stories to life and provoke thought, this is especially evident in The Telltale Heart.

In “Tell Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe develops the plot and creates a mood through the use of metaphors, symbolism, imagery, and foreshadowing. The unique use of said literary devices enables the story to strongly entice the reader’s interest and spark high levels of curiosity. The vivid mental pieces of art are beautifully painted with metaphors, symbolism, and imagery, the tools mastered by the painter, Edgar Allen Poe.

Despite the narrator’s emotions found in the information given to us, he seems to have kept a cool head. This character just murdered an old man yet “I smiled-for what had I to fear?” Poe shines light on the fact that this narrator is insane. This dangerous, mysterious and curious character is revealed in the

He explains how essential it was to kill the older man because he had an evil eye, or as he liked to call it, the eye of a vulture. “The Tell Tale Heart” builds the themes of ambition and guilt through Edgar Allan Poe’s display of imagery, mood, conflict, and symbolism. Imagery and mood allow this story to

In Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the author uses symbolism, point of view, and imagery as a method of building suspense throughout the story, setting a strong foundation of strangeness, and translating the unreliability of the narrator.

Like the aforementioned quote, the narrator could have chosen to stay sane, to just ignore the old man’s eye, but he decided to make things a little more fun by killing the old man. He became so obsessed with this eye, and later on, the heart. Later on, after the murder, while the police are occupying his home, he begins to feel guilty for what he’s done, and the guilt makes him so mad that he eventually confesses. Poe, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, develops the central ideas by repetition, examples of impossibility, and pacing.

Finally, Edgar Allan Poe can be regarded as the architect of the modern short story (“Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849”). His works such as The Black Cat, the Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Tell-Tale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, and many others leave behind an enduring image of macabre and mystery in just a short read. In these tales, Poe doesn’t just tell the reader a scary story, he lets them live it. With a fluid tongue, Poe paints before the reader scenes of terrors that leave the reader hanging on the edge of their seats in built up suspense. In some of his stories he puts the reader in the role of the executioner or even in the victim’s role. For example in The Tell-Tale Heart, The narrator is trying to prove his sanity to himself just after he had murdered his aged roommate. In this story the narrator is driven murderous by the elderly man’s lustrous eye, as one goes through the tale the reader lives through the act of the horrific dismembering and even feels the pressure the narrator does as he reveals his crime to the police. “I talked more and with a

Poe’s poems are not the only writings in which he fashions an aura of suspense and terror; this can be found in Poe’s short stories similarly, with frightening events and twists of the plot exciting the imagination. As with many of Poe’s stories, the human

Poe tells his reader neither the name nor the gender of his main character, suggesting that sin and guilt cycles through the hearts of all. The main character, a nervous person marked by sin and guilt, claims to have a disease which allows him to hear things in heaven, and in earth, and in hell. Nevertheless, the unnamed character denies his madness which only makes him seem madder. In this state, this unnamed one struggles to remember the reason for wanting to kill an old man with whom the story implies he lives; then suddenly proclaims the old man's pale blue eye as the

Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps the most renowned writer of Gothic literature. To start, he used his personal ordeals to compose his anecdotes. Therefore, his countless tales have hidden meanings to them that apply to the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Furthermore, his stories tend to be ominous, inscrutable, and they consistently captivate people’s affections. Although many of his allegories contain these components, two of his stories that best express these elements are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, as well as “The Murders of the Rue Morgue”. These particular tales capture Poe’s eerie, Gothic, approach by being dark and suspenseful, appealing to emotions, and displaying his writing technique.