Throughout Edgar Allen Poe’s chilling narrative, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he makes sure to get the most out of his intended tone, syntactic style, and point of view. He uses these key literary devices in his story to provide a glimpse of what insanity looks like, and how real it truly is. Through the use of these tools, Poe causes the reader to realize that, murderous tendencies aside, they can relate to the narrator much more than they may realize. (Shmoop Editorial Team)
Right from the jump, Poe’s narrator provides us with many a detail about his homicidal plan, which immediately establishes a very threatening vibe. The further along the story gets, and the more imagery the narrator provides us with, the more this creepy, sinister tone …show more content…
He employs both choppy, frantic, simple sentences which highlight his paranoia, as well as long, drawn out descriptions which showcase the narrator’s cluttered, raving mind. For example, take the cluster of simple sentences found in paragraph 2 of The Tell-Tale Heart, as the narrator clumsily states, “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man.” This sloppy, contradictory statement serves to show the reader how quickly the narrator’s mind is racing, frantically trying to justify his actions. Immediately preceding that however, in a very different style, he opens the piece with a pair of lengthy, complexly structured sentences. He makes use of several hyphens and a semicolon, which allow him to extend his thoughts and clarify or revise the things he had said. Furthermore, the narrator often repeats adjectives to place extra emphasis on his description. This can be found several times within just a few paragraphs, when he describes the eye as “wide, wide open,” the hearts tattoo as “louder and louder,” and the state of the old man’s body as “dead… stone, stone dead.” (Kennedy and Gioia 44) The sloppy, convoluted sentence structure give us another channel into the murderer’s mind. This channel provides us with further evidence of his insanity, and as we begin to really see how crazed this man is, …show more content…
(Poe also uses unreliable, perhaps insane narrators in “The Black Cat,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee.”) (Wang and Chazelle) The cunning, meticulous character that Poe creates is, by his very nature, unreliable. He tells us of his ability to lie so easily, masking his feelings and intentions both to the old man he murders, as well as the police officers who arrive to investigate (Kennedy and Gioia 42, 45). This raises a major red flag that he likely has no problem also hiding key details from the audience in order to make himself feel better about his crime. And that right there is a distinctly human trait. We want to cover our own rear-ends and make ourselves look as good as possible (even if its only possible to look slightly less bad). As pointed out by the Shmoop Editorial Team, every person has difficulty recalling things perfectly as they first saw them. This factor, coupled with the fact that we seek to protect our image, in fact makes us unreliable narrators
Right from the jump, Poe’s narrator provides us with many a detail about his homicidal plan, which immediately establishes a very threatening vibe. The further along the story gets, and the more imagery the narrator provides us with, the more this creepy, sinister tone …show more content…
He employs both choppy, frantic, simple sentences which highlight his paranoia, as well as long, drawn out descriptions which showcase the narrator’s cluttered, raving mind. For example, take the cluster of simple sentences found in paragraph 2 of The Tell-Tale Heart, as the narrator clumsily states, “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man.” This sloppy, contradictory statement serves to show the reader how quickly the narrator’s mind is racing, frantically trying to justify his actions. Immediately preceding that however, in a very different style, he opens the piece with a pair of lengthy, complexly structured sentences. He makes use of several hyphens and a semicolon, which allow him to extend his thoughts and clarify or revise the things he had said. Furthermore, the narrator often repeats adjectives to place extra emphasis on his description. This can be found several times within just a few paragraphs, when he describes the eye as “wide, wide open,” the hearts tattoo as “louder and louder,” and the state of the old man’s body as “dead… stone, stone dead.” (Kennedy and Gioia 44) The sloppy, convoluted sentence structure give us another channel into the murderer’s mind. This channel provides us with further evidence of his insanity, and as we begin to really see how crazed this man is, …show more content…
(Poe also uses unreliable, perhaps insane narrators in “The Black Cat,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee.”) (Wang and Chazelle) The cunning, meticulous character that Poe creates is, by his very nature, unreliable. He tells us of his ability to lie so easily, masking his feelings and intentions both to the old man he murders, as well as the police officers who arrive to investigate (Kennedy and Gioia 42, 45). This raises a major red flag that he likely has no problem also hiding key details from the audience in order to make himself feel better about his crime. And that right there is a distinctly human trait. We want to cover our own rear-ends and make ourselves look as good as possible (even if its only possible to look slightly less bad). As pointed out by the Shmoop Editorial Team, every person has difficulty recalling things perfectly as they first saw them. This factor, coupled with the fact that we seek to protect our image, in fact makes us unreliable narrators