Essay On The Tell Tale Heart

Most of Edgar Allan Poe’s work is centered on death and tragic events. In some of Poe’s poems and stories there is the tragic death of a young woman, which corresponds to the loss of women in Poe’s life. It can be inferred that he also suffered from some mental illnesses like many of the characters in his stories. Edgar Allan Poe was a great writer; however his life was full of tragedy and despair, which shaped his writing. To being with, Edgar Allan Poe’s life was full of tragic deaths. His mother died when he was only three years old and Poe was sent to live with John and Frances Allan in Richmond, Virginia. Although Poe bonded with Frances, he and John would never quite get along. When Poe was in his early 20’s, Frances died of

Many of Poe’s narrators were unreliable due to either drug abuse or simple insanity. In some stories, the narrator would start off explaining why one would think he was crazy, although he does not believe he is crazy, and then throughout the story he would end up proving he was indeed mad. In Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator tells of a man he killed simply because the man’s eye bothered him. He begins the story with, “True! -nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe, 303). The narrator questioning his own madness is often proof that the narrator may be unreliable and, most likely, insane. For the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” it is apparent that he is mad due to the highly methodical way he went about killing a man he liked because the man’s eye troubled the narrator. Poe himself may not have killed anyone, but he did struggle with some kind of insanity like the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the story “William Wilson,” the narrator is presumably addicted to opium, alcohol, and gambling. The character William Wilson seems to share many traits with Poe himself when it comes to substance abuse and gambling. The narrator of this story, probably due to the drugs and alcohol, shows signs of madness when he sees his imaginary doppelgänger n more than one occasion.

Most of Poe’s work has a dark gloomy feel and is often fairly disturbing. The darkness of his work is not only a reflection on his substance abuse, but also his reactions to the tragic events he endured. His poem “The Bells” is an example of how Poe sees the world in a sense that things only get worse. The poem starts with the sound of silver bells ringing with joy and ends with the sound of iron bells ringing with death and sadness. In another poem, “Alone,” Poe writes about how it feels to never quite fit in and what it’s like to see the world differently from everyone else. This poem may be one of the most autobiographical works Poe wrote. He truly did see the world differently, much darker and more depressing than others saw it. From the beginning of his life Poe suffered through many hardships. These hardships shaped him into someone who mostly saw the world at its worst and rarely at its best. He took his feelings of despair and transferred them into his writing, which caused his works to be dark, gloomy, and quite depressing. In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe was a magnificent writer, although his poems and stories were disturbingly dark. His works directly reflected his life and outlook on the world. Many of his works echo the tragic loss of women in his life. Other stories contain narrators that mirror him in the sense that he was mentally unstable and was addicted to drugs, alcohol, and gambling.