James Russell Lowell

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,…

Vincent Price’s monologue of the Tell-tale Heart makes action scenes seem more suspenseful. In this scene the narrator is making a plan to kill the old man next door. The reason he wants to kill the old man is because of his eye. The way the narrator's actions and facial expressions allowed the viewer to grasps the situation and what made it so intense. Actions made this so intense when the narrator would rub his legs, taps his feet, scrunches up his shoulders.This showed us how anxious the…

In both a Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat, Edgar Allan Poe uses themes of murder and impossibility to build interest in the reader while simultaneously embedding a lesson of action-consequence. Both the narrators in their respective stories share a quality of madness that leads them to murder. After they kill their victims, they experience either a fictitious heartbeat or highly improbable events. Through these mediums, the reader can't help but feel a sense of regret for the action of the…

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe was narrated by an unknown narrator. We assume he was a man mainly for the reason that he said, “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing” (1). The story was supposedly about the narrator’s fear of an old man’s eye, but I rather see it as the narrator not fearing the eye itself, but fearing how the eye made him feel. For one thing, the narrator had a fear of the old man’s eye because it resembled a vulture’s eye. “He had the eye of a vulture –a pale blue…

"At length it ceased. The old man was dead," brags the narrator. This story is for someone loves horror, then the Tell-Tale heart is perfect read. In the story, the narrator sees himself as cunning and sneaky. However, the reader sees him as insane and chaotic. Poe weaves a creepy tale that creates a chilling mood for the reader, involving murder. In the short story, a deranged lunatic sneaks into a man’s house day after day until he commits a awful, unforgivable deed. The author…

If you cannot trust the person you share a home with, can you unquestionably trust anyone? In the book the tell tale heart, the narrator find his roommates eye, like a vulture. He finds a way to never have to see the menacing eye again. His roommate, also know as, the old man, had know idea what the narrator had anticipated for him. The author of “The Tell Tale Heart”, Edgar Allan Poe, used Characters, suspense, violence, to create a thrilling story. The narrators voice is creepy especially…

Brad MacFee ENGL-102-75A 12/3/2017 Essay #4 How the Tell-Tale Signs of Schizophrenia Provide a Motive for Killing “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, features a schizophrenic narrator who recounts the sequence of events leading up to the murder of an old man and his eventual confession to the murder. Throughout the story, the narrator exhibits many strange behaviors that suggest that he is quite abnormal. For example, the narrator describes his extreme vendetta against, not the old man,…