The Tell Tale Heart Figurative Language Analysis

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; not characters. A character is a caricature.”-Ernest Hemingway. In a story authors design people, but we define them as characters. Characters have minds, feeling, moods, and looks, just like humans and we put them in a text and can’t help pretending that they exist. In the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the author uses descriptive writing and figurative language to develop the characters. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe that uses descriptive writing to develop the characters in a way to make the story interesting. One example is, “Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, …show more content…
The author uses a metaphor to describe the old man, “I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” This example supports my thesis because when he compares the man’s eye to a vulture's it helps you understand how he sees the man. This helps you understand the man’s fear. Then, later on in the story he uses repetition, “I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed… I moved it slowly- very, very slowly… I undid the lantern cautiously- oh so cautiously, cautiously.” This helps the reader understand the story by exaggerating the fact that the man is not in his right mind; he is repeating himself, making the story of him murdering an old man more suspenseful. The last example is the author using personification to describe the man's eye, “For it was the man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his evil eye.” This helps the reader understand the fear he feels when he looks into that man’s eye; it also helps you understand the man's personality, if he was a nice man then the mad-man wouldn't have such a strong urge to kill him. The Author uses figurative language to help the reader understand the text, and also the main character’s