The Tell-Tale Heart
Like many of Edgar Allen Poe's works, "The Tell-Tale Heart" is full of death and darkness. Poe used many of the real life tragedies he experienced as inspiration for his gothic style of writing. Poe dealt with many aspects of death and madness in his stories, madness again is playing a key role in the plot. In this short story Poe used literary devices such as point of view and symbolism to give it a more dramatic effect and add to the madness the narrator portrays. Poe's use of the point of view device is very evident in "The Tell-Tale Heart". The madman that speaks through the entire story talks in an unreliable first person view. Because of the man's obvious madness you are not sure what is taking place in the introduction and what the actual events of the story were. Although there is a definite madness in the man's attitude and he is constantly aware of it yet he makes many claims that he is not mad at all. "You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded-with what caution-with what foresight-with what dissimulation I went to work!...Ha!-would a madman have been so wise as this?" He is obviously well aware of his madness b
In another part of the story the narrator tries to explain what he says we see as his madness. "The Tell-Tale heart is kind of saying that your own heart knows what you've done and in the long run guilt will find you out. The main object of symbolism however is the beating of the heart of the old man the narrator hears because of his madness. I gasped for breath-and yet the officers heard it not. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. no, no! They heard!-they suspected!-they knew!-they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. His madness was the thing that drove to murder and to confess to it. And now a new anxiety seized me me-the sound would be heard by a neighbor!" Because of the narrator's own madness he is hearing this heart beat as though it is as loud as a scream.
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