A Comparison Of Rip Van Winkle And The Tell-Tale Heart

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Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving and The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe are two stories that are very different. In these stories the way the narration, theme, and the impossible events are major factors in the story. These factors will be explored, while trying to find similarities between the two. The Tell Tale Heart is about an insane man telling the audience about how he is not crazy. The story starts out with a man stating that he is not crazy and continues to explain why he killed a man. Throughout the story tell the audience that it was the man’s evil eye that drove him to the murder. What got him caught was the dead man’s heart beating in the floor. Rip Van Winkle is about a man who fell asleep for twenty years and …show more content…

There are numerous differences and similarities between the two. The themes of the two stories are wildly different on the surface, but there are some similarities. The theme of Rip Van Winkle is a man running away from responsibility and wife and The Tell Tale Heart convincing the audience of his sanity. The end of Rip’s adventure, he has to convince the villagers of his story. The narration is completely different and is told from different points of view. The Tell Tale Heart has a first person telling and Rip Van Winkle is told from a third person viewpoint. The biggest similarity between the two stories is the impossible events that progress the stories. In The Tell Tale Heart there is the “Evil Eye” and the heart beating in the floor. In the first event, the narrator is convinced that the old man’s bad eye is evil and that called him to kill the old man. The second, the heart beating in the floor and trying to tell the police what he did. Who could believe either one of these events could happen in the real world. The old man’s eye was evil and plotting to do something to the narrator. The heart beating after the body had been chopped up and stored under the floor was insane. The impossible event in Rip Van Winkle is that Rip drank something and fell asleep for 20 years. Who could believe that someone could sleep for 20 years, through a war, and be okay? These events had to happen to progress the story or it would be a man running from his wife and a man murdering

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