don't tell

Iconic, gore, horror, gothic, insanity… All common characteristics of some of the most incredible tales by the famous Edgar Allan Poe. His stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, Tell Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Cask of Amontillado, brought grotesque tastes to the horror genre throughout the 19th century. Poe’s stories discussed, in detail, each characters horrific behaviors and their unreliable nature which reveal the influence the author had over his own literary works. Most say Poe’s…

The opening scene of “The Fall of the House of Usher” immediately welcomes us to a mysterious environment and a false sense of reality. The story seeming dream-like moves to the narrator approaching the feared house and a family member ushers him inside swiftly. While there an unnamed narrator experiences many supernatural activities and sees a constant connection between the house and its owners. He finds himself questioning his senses and psychological state when he concludes that an…

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe focuses on the narrator’s mental deterioration and obsessions. The story is told from the first-person point of view. The point of view is key because readers only know what the narrator thinks. Because the story is only told from the point of the madman, it is hard to understand why he goes insane. Through the first-person point of view, the narrator’s fascinations are revealed. The narrator’s fascinations include: his own sanity, the old man’s eye, and…

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. In this short story there is a protagonist who is never named. He lives with an old man and eventually plots and kills the old man. Throughout the story the protagonist changes and the reader is able to read along and follow his development. The story’s events affect the protagonist and test his mental health and sanity, where as his actions characterize him as a psychopath and murderer. At the beginning of this story the protagonist…

normalize and to enforce”(Choen 25). The practices that Cohen is referring to are those that society deems unacceptable, or peculiar, and by engaging oneself in such practices one then becomes a monster. Moreover, the narrator’s actions within Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” were deemed both unlawful and a forbidden because he ended someone’s life without probable cause. “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was…

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story written by Edgar Allen Poe and is a story which I’m pretty sure, much like many other mandatory school readings like Shakespeare and Thatcher, that many of you have read and most of you have forgotten, myself included. To recap the tale, and summarize for those of you who actually haven’t read it, the Tell-Tale Heart follows the story of a man who tries his best to convince us he is not crazy whilst he plots to murder someone for the sole reason that one specific…

Albert Camus is widely recognized as one of the most influential writers in the field of existentialism. Despite his personal distaste for being labeled as such, many of his literary works contain elements that strongly resemble the ideas held by the existentialist school of thought. In Camus’ novel The Stranger, the main character, Meursault, kills an Arab on the beach due to the perceived notion that the Arab was an agent of the sun sent to harm him; the author conveys this absurdity by…

odd short story is its style; more specifically how it’s style emphasises the allegorical nature of the work. Among the more unusual devices that Poe uses to deliver his message is the language and sentence structure within the text, which not only tells of the story but is also part of it and it’s heavy intentional symbolism. The question, then, to be asked is what Poe was trying to convey in the structure and word choice of this short story. The answer is, of course, much longer and more…

“The world is made up of two classes -- the hunters and the hunted.” The previously mentioned hunter and the hunted is a common set of roles for characters in short stories, novels, plays, and films. The story The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell is a classic example. Whenever a piece of literature, such as a short story or a novel, are adapted into a film or another medium, changes are common. These changes can be minor and have no effect on the story, such as renaming a character;…

A supposed “friendship” between a crazed murderer and a drunk ends in a horrible fate for the drunk. In this short horror, “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe, the reader is brought to the mind of a psychopathic man who has a huge hunger for murder. The readers are walked through chilling and suspenseful thoughts of the narrator, then brought through unsettling places that will surely send a chill down your spine, and later brought through words of suspense. This is where Poe is…