The Tell-Tale Heart Analysis

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The Tell-Tale Heart “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a piece that appeals to a psychological side of the reader. As the reader, we get to take a look inside the head of a man that is driven mad by, what is assumed to be the relentless heartbeat of the victim of his vicious crime. Poe is thought to believe that in order for a piece of literature to be considered grand, it must evoke emotions from its reader. This story was a perfect example of Poe’s ability to reach a sinister side that exists in everyone. This short story was published in 1843. The main character is an unnamed narrator who swears by his sanity after he murdered an old man because of his “vulture eye”. The narrator carefully plots the murder and hides the body by dissecting it into small pieces to hide under the floorboard of his home. Conclusively, the narrator’s guilt exposes itself in the hallucination of the victim’s heart still beating under the floorboard. In Poe’s story he rattles the cage of human reality, as a reader we can relate to the ideation behind the story, whether we want to admit it or not. Throughout the story Poe is able to spark one’s curiosity and forces the reader to follow the narrator through an eerie maze of his mind process. We are able to hear and interpret his words through his version of reality. One could consider this story as a murder mystery, where the mystery isn’t the question of “who did it?” but of “why?” As a reader we don’t quite understand the narrator’s motives behind the murder. The reader is also left ponder the fear of death, dying, and how one person has the ability to kill another. This being common for Poe, this story, along with others, is saturated with sadness and a sense of mourning. Poe is able to create a chilling atmosphere just by his vocabulary use alone. Along with that, he uses sentence structures that help to build on to the sentence
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