Madness And Insanity In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence,” quoted from the famous works of Edgar Allan Poe to describe a character of a madness and insanity in his work called The Tell-Tale Heart. It is a short story that intrigues the audience with a narrator who is madly obsessed with something so minor, that it drives him into a terrible crime. This story included many elements that helped Poe to develop the plot, but the major literary aspects that the story would suffer without are its tone, imagery, and characterization. An analysis of these three elements will disclose just how Poe achieved its longing effect of excitement, horror, and mystery. How can an author develop the mood for a story in the way that the audience needs to perceive it? The answer to that question is tone, “the perspective or attitude that the author adopts with regards to a specific character, place or development,” (Merriam, 2015). For many …show more content…
Even though “The Tell-Tale Heart” included limited characters that did not stop Poe. Using his innovating skills to reveal the narrator, the old man, and the officers, Poe drove the story into a descriptive masterpiece. For instance, each character was revealed to the audience indirectly, the officers were described as “three men who introduced themselves with suavity,” the old man’s only description came from his name and his eye, and lastly, the narrator had no description of his own besides the madness he claimed he did not possess. Poe’s indirect descriptive technique offered his audience the freedom of imagining who the next character would be in each pause of a comma. Also allowing the narrator to describe the characters gave the story its core tone a nervous mood. In a nutshell, something this story simply could be told without is its characters and characterization to make them come to