Tell-Tale Heart Compare Contrast Essay

Improved Essays
“It grew quicker and quicker, louder and louder!”Edgar Allen Poe has produced many great pieces but this one is possibly the best. I’m here to tell you about the “Tell Tale Heart”. This has been written as a story and used as a play. I have gotten to see both and they were similar and different in many ways.

There were plenty of similarities in the “Tell Tale Heart”. In both, the old man has the “vulture eye” that makes another man mad(page 1). This man ends up wanting to murder him. In both the play and story, this is exactly what happens. The man kills the older man not for his gold or wrongdoing but because of the eye in the two versions (page 1). He buries the man under the floorboards in both as well(page 2). Once the police arrive,
…show more content…
In the play there was only one policeman but in the story there are three policemen(page 2). Also when the old man is killed in the play, the eye is spooned out, however in the story that doesn’t happen. The story stated that the old man was killed when a bed was on top of him but the play contradicted that saying he was choked with a scarf(page 2). Finally when he was cutting limbs off in the story it was with a saw but they used a cleaver to do it in the play(page 2).

The director made plenty of choices in the play. The director made the choice to choke the man with a scarf. Since the play is a visual it better portrayed his death then just putting a bed over him(page 2). It showed the drama to the scene. Also the background music captured the emotion of it. It displayed the beating of his heart which made it very dramatic at the end when he confessed. Also the lighting shined right on the man who murdered the old man. The light also showed various things that are important. When the old man was chopped up they made the cleaver look bloody which was a great addition. All of these were dramatic and I believe they were all good additions.

The Tell Tale Heart is a very important piece and the play and story contrast each other. As you can see there are very similar and

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In “The-Tell Tale Heart”, the narrator describes himself as a caretaker for an old man and his house. In “The Black Cat” the narrator describes himself as a wealthy, animal loving man. What does this have to do with suspense? You’ll soon see. In both stories, the narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” are portrayed as people who are insane and murderous, and despite appearing normal, they both state (whether it be directly or indirectly) that they are mentally unstable.…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Vincent Price’s monologue of the Tell-tale Heart makes action scenes seem more suspenseful. In this scene the narrator is making a plan to kill the old man next door. The reason he wants to kill the old man is because of his eye. The way the narrator's actions and facial expressions allowed the viewer to grasps the situation and what made it so intense. Actions made this so intense when the narrator would rub his legs, taps his feet, scrunches up his shoulders.…

    • 266 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The plot of the story differed in some spots but in most spots it was the same. One of them is when Mrs. White goes outside and Mr. White tells her to come back in was explained in both of them. Another is when she is trying to let Herbert in and the bolt falls. Those were both explained in the book and the play. There were also some differences.…

    • 772 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The film animation of Tell Tale Heart was a great adaptation of the story by Edgar Allen Poe because it matched the tone of the story. The adaptation used the narrator to match the tone of the characters being presented. The abstract animation gave the story a lot more power. Poe stresses insanity of the mind and mental illnesses in majority of his work. The story itself was more abstract on how descriptive the character was in describing the old man and his feeling towards him.…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allen Poe captivated everyone with the short story The Tell-Tale Heart, which forced readers to questions one's mental state, deciding on whether someone is guilty or innocent, whether someone is conscious of their actions, or if they are sane or criminally insane. The Tell-Tale Heart is the perfect example of the argument of whether an individual is aware of their actions and the crimes they commit or if they are possessed and driven to commit crimes by something in their mind, in which they could possibly use an insanity plea during their trial if they are caught. The narrator, who Edgar Allen Poe portrays as insane, is not, and during this essay, I will outline examples as to why he is not and that he is fully aware of the crimes that he is committing. The first example as to his premeditation is how he is explaining the story to the audience.…

    • 781 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Many characters in this play lie and deny any truth that can cause them to get into any kind of trouble. This play can be described in many words, but using courage, weakness, and truth to…

    • 1202 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    He also says ' 'I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. ' ' (1). Then he declares that it was wasn 't the gold that motivated him to kill the old man but the narrator thought it was the old man 's blue eye, which simulated of a vulture 's eye.…

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    He had the eye of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees-very gradually-I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” Therefore this proves that the caregiver is obsessing over the old man’s mocking eye, and that the eye is driving him to become irrational and at the same time making him seem less humane. As mentioned in the other story, the “Monkey's Paw”, Mrs. White, on of the main characters is driven insane when she realizes the paw ‘slaughtered’ her son. She ends up blaring and acting spastically when she thinks her lost son has ‘risen from the dead’,…

    • 1309 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dancing Within Sanity Through the discourse of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Tell Tale Heart, both wrapped up and enclosed in the open space that entails its given genre, Gothic Literature. However, despite its given distinction of characters, settings, gender, and action, both are dually intertwined in regards to the nature each narrative and plot takes. The Tell-Tale Heart illustrates and manifests itself with a distinct narrator with a kind of “split nature”, a man who can perhaps be described as suffering from an intense form of paranoia, while the latter denoting an exacerbation of a mental condition and ultimately concluding with a paradoxical and freeing insanity, yet despite such unintended respite, both alike through the…

    • 1730 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Of the two representations of “The Tell Tale Heart” the animated version is better than the other version. The goods of the animated version is that it tells us the whole story in the movie. In the book it tells us that the old mans eye bothers him and he wants to get rid of the eye for ever and in the movie tells us the same thing. Based on what I watched the animated version had more details about the book than the other movie version. They both told us that someone thought there was sighs of foul play.…

    • 211 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Oh you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly -- very, very slowly”. The narrator then commits the murder of the old man and hides the body underneath the floor. The reason given for the murder is the old man’s “vulture eye” as it’s called by the…

    • 979 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The caretaker in The Tell-Tale Heart carefully executes his long thought out plan. He takes eight nights to plan his murder of the old man and his evil eye. It is not until the eighth night that the caretaker can see the vulture eye. When he sees the eye, he releases all of his built up resentment for the eye. “It was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon the vulture eye.”…

    • 781 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    However, the flawed and “evil eye,” in reality, represents the narrator’s own eye or evil perception. As stated in the passage, the harmless old man never did anything to the narrator. “He had never given me insult” (Poe 715). Despite that, the narrator was blind by having more concern about his fear for the eye than the old man’s life.…

    • 1022 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Tell Tale Heart, the insane story of a self assured sane man. This short story was published during 1843 by the eccentric author Edgar Allan Poe. In this short story, the frantic narrator diligently tries to convince the reader that he is a sane man, while providing contradicting details for his quest to murder an innocent old man. His reasons behind it? Simply because he is agitated by the old man’s eye and finds it distasteful.…

    • 1086 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1)What type of conflict (heart of action) exists in The Tell-Tale Heart? The type of conflict in The Tell-Tale Heart is the character versus Himself because the whole story was an internal conflict. In the story, he is battling against the vulture eye of the old man and it is obvious the eye isn’t evil. The narrator has it all in his head.…

    • 516 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays