The Tell Tale Heart Theme Of Insanity

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Recommended: Analyze the character of the short story The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

Aaliyah Franco
Ms. Samora
LA 8: Period 7
30 March 2017
Insanity Through Guilt
The want to do something wrong is in all of mankind. There are certain moments in life that define you. Whether you choose to give in to the wrong or not is what will make-up some of those moments. In his story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe writes to show the imperfections of people, the gruesome thoughts a person can have, and how these thoughts (“imperfections”) affect your actions. In the story there is a man (the narrator) who is watching over an elderly man in his home. A certain feature of the old man starts to taunt the narrator, this slowly starts driving him mad. This lunacy transitions into him murdering the old man. Following the murder, the police show up at the narrator’s house. Everything was …show more content…

At this point in the story, the narrator is explaining the way he tediously stalked the old man every night. This adds to his yearning of having the old man out of his life. On page 17 in paragraph 10 Edgar Allan Poe writes, “The sound a watch makes when developed in cotton(Poe 10).” When this is heard, this sound drives the narrator mad and insane. Poe later on uses this in the story to represent the character’s guilty conscience. Anger affects people in different ways, this shows me this because anger is very obvious you get really mad on something if it's either not important or it is important to people. Shortly after this is written in the text, the story reads, “It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulated the soldier into courage.” The tone, in which the narrator relays this gives us the impression that he wishes death on the old man, so much that any sign of life that may be evident is maddening. The tone shows the general character or attitude of a place, piece of writing which is the situational and

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