The Horror of The Tell-Tale Heart Essay - 970 Words

The Horror of The Tell-Tale Heart Writers can use many tricks to make a story seem more interesting to the reader. From the words they pick to the setting to the time of the day... the possibilities are endless. In the story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, the use of light and darkness, the description of the mans eye and the time frame make the story more scary than anything else. Poe also uses suspense at the end to make the readers heart beat faster. The speaker starts the story out by explaining that he doe not hate the old man that he is about to kill. In fact he even says that he loves him and that he has always been nice to him. The reason he must kill him however is because of what he calls his evil eye. When†¦show more content†¦Night after night he performed this same deed until he made a noise that woke the old man up. When he tried to shine the light on the man he saw that the eye was looking around and it was at this point the speaker finally decides to kill the man. The single ray being on the man open eye just before he is killed is symbolic in that it almost made the reader seem that there was some hope left that something good was going to happen or that maybe the speaker would not have the courage to go through with the whole deed. However, the speaker quickly dismisses this idea when he leaps for the man and murders him. The next trick used in this story to make it scary was the beating of the mans heart once he woke up and came to be suspicious that someone was in the room with him. The speaker describes the beating of the heart as so strange a noise as [it] excited me to uncontrollable terror (Poe, 3). At this point the reader may think that it is the conscious of the speaker that is really bothering him rather than the mans heartbeat. Every time the speaker refers to the heartbeat he says that it keeps getting louder and louder. One can come to the assumption that at this point the speaker is only looking for reasons to support his killing a man. And in fact it is the beating of the mans heart that drove the speaker/killer to confessing about what he has done and showing the police where the body was. The next strategy used to keepShow MoreRelatedHorror and Figurative Language in The Tell Tale Heart1288 Words   |  6 PagesHorror and Figurative Language in The Tale-Tell Heart Dreadfully chilling, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is a horrific short story that introduces the reader to an utterly mad narrator who is driven to commit vile and heinous acts because of his unnatural obsession with his roommates, an old man, cataract eye. The narrators madness is revealed instantly, only to be substantiated when he devises a sinister plan to rid himself of the vulture eye forever. 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