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Poe's Short Story Critique: The Tell-Tale Heart

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Poe’s Short Story Critique: The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” has created a new genre with psychopaths that to this day are still used in movies like, The Joker in “The Dark Knight” and even in TV series like “Murdoch Mysteries”, with James Gillies . Poe’s genius writing is shown in “A Cask of Amontillado and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. However, “The Tell-Tale Heart left me agape at the end of the story. Now, I’m going to share with you the best short story I have ever read. I loved the old man, said the narrator, right before he decided to kill him. The narrator had set his mind on killing him, because he hated the old man’s eye, which he described as a vulture’s eye. Every night, for seven nights, he would enter the …show more content…
The point of view in this story is first person and being inside the narrator’s head was to say the least interesting. The narrator is unreliable due to his psychological state, for this reason not everything he would say or think makes it true, therefore it leaves room for us as readers to choose what to believe. For instance when he says: “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.”(Poe 1) Well since the narrator is unreliable, he might just be thinking it took an hour to place his head in the room because he found it that long, but it could have been five minutes. Furthermore, this is where we choose to believe the narrator or not. Additionally, the point of view in the story emphasizes the setting. The tone, since its first person is the tone of the protagonist which is amusing. The narrator was proud of what he did and sounded amused while telling the story. For example in the text it says: “I smiled,--for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome.”(Poe 4) I cannot imagine the story in another point of view and I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did. The mood in this story is mysterious, so the tone and mood contrasts each other thanks to the point of view, in my opinion, to create the perfect blend to enrich the

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