"The Tell-Tale Heart"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" succeeds because it is a scary story. The author points out that Poe utilizes the narrator's interior monologue in this story as an effective tool to provide a glimpse into this man's whose deteriorating sanity is an excellent example of how people can deceive themselves--especially in their own minds. The paper relates that the old man's beating heart is present only in the narrator's mind and may very well be the sound of his own heart pounding away in his chest after he has just completed his cruel act.

From the Paper:

"In many ways, Poe established a new way of storytelling. Jack Sullivan notes that Poe "revolutionized the horror tale, endowing it with new psychological insight and consistency of tone and atmosphere." Poe's tales are "painfully artful, interrupted by quotations and foreign phrases, and cluttered with adjectives as rococo as headstones in a Hollywood cemetery." Many of Poe's tales can best be described as "tales of intrusion--whether culmination in the act of violent murder or in the psychological violation of another person or in describing the internal war of the divided self." "The Tell-tale Heart" features what Parini calls "internalized elements of anxiety and fear pushed to an unrelenting extreme." The narrator's anxiety and our fear work together to create a heightened sense of terror as we read the story. We become attached to this man and his emotions because he is so intent on expressing them and so intent on us reading them and believing him."

More papers on "The Tell-Tale Heart":

• Analytical Essay # 58794 : "Themes in "The Tell-Tale Heart"
• Analytical Essay # 6098 : "The Tell Tale Heart"
• Article Review # 129127 : "The Tell Tale Heart:" A Tell Tale Story of Incest"
• Book Review # 128040 : "The Terror of Madness in "The Tell-Tale Heart"

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