Amy Lowell

Poe creates fear and dread through many different things, one is through characters. One character he uses is the narrator; the narrator is insane. He hears things like the heart beat of the old man. The narrator keeps giving us more and more reason why he is insane. One is that he watched the old man while he was sleeping for 8 straight nights. The narrator slowly opened the door slowly every night until he could fit his head in. “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so…

In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the author uses aspects of setting to illustrate the atmosphere of terror. Indeed, he uses aspects such as time and place to put an emphasis on the feeling of terror. Firstly, the old man’s bedroom is pitch black: “His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness” (56). Darkness suggests the unknown, which frightens the man since he doesn’t know what to expect. The old man is alone in a place where his sight is lacking. The five senses are…

“Sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.” is a famous quote by the famous horror author Edward Allan Poe. A horror story needs several horrifying elements. It needs a scary setting, a great deal of suspension, and a creepy source of horror. The “Tell- Tale Heart” by Edward Allan Poe has all of these. In the story a old man has been given a crazy caregiver. The insane man believes that one of the old man's eyes is…

Death penalty, mental hospital, or something in between? The short-story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is narrated in first person in the view of a killer. The main character tries to convince the reader that he is normal making it obvious that he's unaware of his mental illness. This is shown when he obsesses over “the eye” of the old man and plans a deadly murder around it. The narrator walks us through his thought as he ends up horrifically killing the old man. This is after…

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe, which a story that revolves around the vivid memory of the narrator’s calculated moves, from inception to the murder itself. The narrator bares his soul, and his strong sense of paranoia to justify his sanity, but in the end, confirms his ‘madness’ by the vile act of murder he commits. The narrator reveals the profound truth, of how untruthful and deceiving the human heart could be, and at the same time, how it can be…

Poe’s speciality is to leave loose ends and dozens of interpretations, all of them intertwined in the topic of the double. Therefore, the tale is at first a nest of doubles. The madman and the old man are at the centre of this horrible tale in which one is murdered by the other, and the most important aspect of their duality might be there, on the line of the madman’s retelling of the events, since one of the main aspects of Poe’s fiction is the one of the narrator’s unreliability. Should we…

The variation of strange and disturbed characters has been a constant throughout all works of gothic fiction. In The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator murders an old man for which he has an almost familial love. It is clear that the novel’s narrator has a questionable mental state due to his weak grasp upon reality. This is seen in the way he attributes special powers to the old man’s eye and in his incomprehension towards neighbours hearing the final heartbeats of his victim.…

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the main character kills an old man simply because it bothers him that the man has a film over his eye. The protagonist then chops up the old man’s body and buries the pieces beneath the floorboards of his house. But is he mentally insane or a calculated killer? The text supports the classification of a calculated killer because he knew what he was doing was wrong, he was very meticulous in his planning, and he was particularly careful in…

The narrator’s words and actions present him as an unreasonable, and untrustworthy narrator. The narrator of Tell Tale Heart attempts to justify his actions and prove to the audience why he is not insane. The reason he tells the story is to try and defend his sanity, yet he confesses to killing the old man that he is a caretaker for. Ironically, he gives proof that he does have a paranoid personality disorder, when trying to convince the audience that what he did was not insane. The old man,…

What would you do if you were staring down an old man with a mocking vulture eye while he sleeps? In this story it describes every step that the main character did to survive this dreaded feeling inside. In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe the author uses good word choice and descriptive adjectives to develop the mood and the characters feelings in the story. Edgar Allen Poe used a lot of word choice in this story to develop the mood and the way the characters act. First,…