Essay Comparing The Raven And The Tell Tale Heart

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Dorothy Rowe once said,“Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer”. It’s true sometimes depression may lead to insanity. Both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” have a theme of depression to insanity. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story about a narrator's perspective that kills an innocent old man since his eye is terrifying. “The Raven” is a poem about a speaker that grieves for his lost love Lenore. A raven that represents death shows up to his chamber door in the middle of the night. Edgar Allen Poe uses symbolism, metaphor, and imagery in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” to create a powerful short story. Poe has a strong use of symbolism, using something or someone to represent an idea, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven”, which creates emotion and explain a story. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the beating of the heart symbolizes the narrator’s guilt. As the narrator is in the room with the police, he hears “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton….was the beating of the old man's heart,”(Poe 1). The narrator starts to feel guilty …show more content…

Although the narrator has just killed the old man to get relief the mood is tense, “the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror,”(Poe 1). The use of auditory image is appealing to the reader because the whole house is silent although he has just killed a man. In “The Raven,” Poe uses imagery by describing the setting of the poem. As the speaker was in his chamber the mood was very serious and dreary, “the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain….filled….with fantastic terrors never felt before,” (Poe 13-14). The imagery shows not only the scene, but also the

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