Analysis Of The Tell Tale Heart

In numerous short stories, authors use different writing styles to grab a reader’s attention. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe uses imagery and eccentric language choices to hook the reader into wanting to know more. Poe’s use of these different literary aspects is most clearly seen in the passages where the narrator is describing the old man’s eye. These passages are important because they help the reader empathize with the old man and question why the narrator is so fixated on his eye. Poe includes these passages to show the madness of the narrator and to emphasize the importance of the old man’s eye. Poe starts the short story with the narrator talking about why the eye was so significant to him. He describes the old man’s eye as one that

Once the old man is dead, his eye can no longer haunt the narrator, “His eye would trouble me no more.” (787), but the old man still manages to get to him. When the police arrive after the body has been dismembered, and the old man’s eye has been destroyed, the narrator is completely calm because he has finally rid himself of the “Evil Eye” (786). Although the eye no longer haunts him, he still feels the old man’s presence through a different body part, his dead beating heart. The sound starts as “a low, dull, quick sound-much such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” (787). This description is repeated twice in the story, once right before the old man dies, and again after the police and the author are sitting on the old man’s remains. As the sound grows louder and louder, the narrator gets more and more anxious and his manner of speaking turns into frantic, rushed sentences, “I felt that I must scream or die!-and now-again!-hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!-“ (788). Poe chooses to write in quick, jabbed words here to show that the old man’s heart finally got to be too much for the narrator, just like his eye had