The Tell-Tale Heart Rhetoric

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Adriana Gomez Engl.1302-137 02/19/15 Dr. HType to enter text Type to enter text “The Tell-Tale Heart” “I heard all things in heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad” (Poe, Edgar Allan, “Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing” 440) ? How many young adults have the desire and time to sit down and read a book? Not many; that is why Sir Edgar Allen Poe wrote intriguing, short stories, to capture readers minds from people of all ages, for generations to come. One of his most popular stories among readers is titled “The Tell-Tale Heart”. This short story shows how spine-tingling and utterly impressive Poe’s short stories can turn out to be. Edgar Allen Poe, born 1809 to a family of actors…show more content…
Many times throughout the story, the narrator says that he knows how the old man feels. He claims to know the groans of the old man, and that he too had experienced the same moans—not of pain or sadness but of mortal terror. It is a terror which “arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe.” I agree with Chua’s statement because I feel as if the narrator is sincere when he says that he knows how it feels to be fearful, but at the same time the narrator is convincing himself that he was in that position once and knows how it feels showing that he lives in a world of his own and is most definitely not mentally stable. Poe gets the reader to feel sorry for the narrator, thus, leading you to be vulnerable just as the old man was. The way that he get’s the audience involved (as an illusion), almost putting them in the old man’s position, is why Poe is unique and inclined above many readers alike. Alfred C. Ward has a very strong yet intriguing take on Poe’s writing style, he writes,“Two things, at least, should be remembered, however, when we make these strictures in regard to Edgar Allan Poe’s work. First, that he had ever before him the aberrations of his own troubled mind—doubtfully poised at all times, perhaps, and almost certainly subject to more or less frequent periods of disorder: consequently, it was probably more nearly normal, for him, to picture the abnormal than to depict the average. Second, that literary men in general, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were still in the trough of the wave of German romanticism, which exalted extravagant and clamorous and stormy sentimentality above the quieter, deeper, truer moods of human feeling.” I personally agree with Ward because all of Poe’s stories made me wonder if he was indicating himself. We all know he had an

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