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The Tell-Tale Heart
The main conclusion of Poe's short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that the narrator is indeed insane. In the opening paragraphs of the story, the narrator goes out of his way to ensure the reader...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator does say that he loves the old man. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had nevergiven me insult. (p. 4) However, the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Let us remember that foreshadowing is a technique used by authors where they deliberately plant clues at the beginning or in the middle of the story about what is going to happen later on in that...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
There is great imagery (5 senses) in this story. The first is the descriptions of the old man's eye, which is the catlyst for the murder: "He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Language technique are a category of literary device. When one is examining language technique, he or she is examining and identifying the use of literary techniques like metaphors, similes,...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator has been sneaking into the old man's room for a week, each night at midnight, hoping to be able to kill the old man, but the narrator has not been able to do it yet because the old man...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator's tone in this story is quite overwrought, leading to a climax at the end when he shrieks out his confession to murder. He is disturbed in his mind, and this is conveyed in his nervous...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The above-referenced passage from Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is certainly interesting to analyze. We have an unreliable narrator telling us how cunning he is while carrying out a murder. Then we...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart claims that he is not mad because of his actions, which he claims were too well thought out to be done by a mad person. He starts off by saying that he has a...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The above-mentioned passage comes from Poe's short story "Tell-Tale Heart" after the unreliable narrator has killed "the old man," dismembered him, and secured the body underneath the floorboards...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
A symbol is an object that stands for something, and has greater meaning that its literal purpose in the story. Two symbols in “The Tell-tale Heart” are the heart and the eye. The most obvious...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
This passage from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" can be analyzed as part of the characterization of the narrator. He recalls, Every night about twelve o’clock I slowly opened his door....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story features a narrator who commits the premeditated murder of a vulnerable elderly man and then succumbs to delusions that lead him to reveal his crime to the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The genre of gothic fiction, and gothic horror in particular, is generally understood to originate with the publication of Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Some elements of...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Indirect characterization occurs when an author allows readers to form judgments about the qualities of a character rather than directly stating those qualities. The author can do this by showing...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe has shown us the various deranged states of the narrator through his inability to keep 'normal' time. His intensely deliberate actions at the beginning contrast with his wild raving and...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In the Tell-Tale Heart, the situational irony occurs when the old man (who is very rich), lives in torment fearing that robbers would go and steal his gold and many possessions, so he keeps his...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Tone is typically used to describe the way the writer feels about the subject of their text. A writer can be sympathetic or judgmental, amused or mocking, matter-of-fact or condescending, or any...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is continually accusing us of thinking him mad. This, indeed, is how he opens the story. True—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Different editions of Poe's stories arrange the paragraphs slightly differently. However, in most copies, including the one in the hypertext library curated by the University of Virginia...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
I think the narrator was always mad, or at least mad long before the end of the story. Initially, in the first paragraph, he says that he "had been" and is now "dreadfully nervous." He says that he...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In order for you to come up with a thesis statement, you need to first have a topic of discussion. A thesis statement is meant to concisely summarize what you intend to talk about in your paper, so...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The evidence that the narrator provides for his claim that he is not mad can be found in the first two paragraph's of Poe's short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart." First, the narrator claims that if...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
I seriously doubt that Edgar Allan Poe based any of the events of "The Tell-Tale Heart" on his own personal experiences. Poe may have had his mental demons, but he was apparently never involved in...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Although the first-person narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe gives us a great deal of information about feelings and interior psychological states, we actually know very little...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Simply put, the narrator is crazy. A more developed answer might be, the narrator is unbalanced. Because he thinks he can hear the old man's heart, he thinks others can too. Therefore, he kills the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Typically, the horror story genre will draw upon a reader's fear of the unknown, create a sense of dread, and include extreme acts of violence. Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart"...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In comparing Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," and Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House," the mood of the stories is strikingly different. In Poe's tale of horror, "The Tell-Tale Heart,"...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" has had a nervous breakdown which has left him slightly deranged. He is hypersensitive to benign aspects of his environment and becomes fixated on the things...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator fears several things. On the surface, he fears the old man especially because of the eye. When the narrator can stand the eye no longer, he kills...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe sets the eerie tone of his classic horror short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," from the opening sentences. The narrator admits that he is mad immediately, although he tries to...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
When the madman narrates his tale, time just drags by, almost coming to a standstill until the instant of the murder. This helps heighten anticipation, suspense and the even the sense of horror....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
There are several elements that make Poe's antagonist particularly unsettling and disturbing. The unreliable narrator of Poe's classic short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" is depicted as a neurotic,...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Diction refers to the author's choice of vocabluary and style of expression in a story, poem, or any other piece of writing. In the case of Edgar Allan Poe in The Tell-Tale Heart, the chosen...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In “The Tell-tale Heart” the narrator seems to believe that the reader doubts his sanity, because he is constantly asking if we think he’s mad and reminding us that he is not. The narrator tries to...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The answer to this question is based on an individual reader's opinion. It is possible for a reader to believe and defend that the narrator's lack of trustworthiness actually decreases the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator tells the reader that due to his nervous condition, his senses are necessarily heightened. He says that his sense of...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
It's fun and easy to compare these two classic American horror short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado. SIMILARITIES A mentally unstable narrator and...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The speaker lets the police into his apartment in order to reassure them that he has nothing to hide from them. However, the longer they stay, the more he begins to grow agitated. He feels that he...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In literature, a static character is someone who does not develop or undergo an important change throughout the story. A static character's perspective and personality remain the same from the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
To be clear, Poe is not the narrator of this story. The narrator is some young(ish) man who lives with an older man, perhaps his own father, and who has grown obsessed with the older man's...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The murderer keeps insisting that he is sane. In fact, he seems to be telling, or writing, this story specifically in order to prove his sanity. In doing this, however, he gives more and more...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In the opening paragraph of the short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe establishes the narrator as unreliable through his erratic, staccato syntax, his continual insistence that he is completely...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
On the subject of suspense, twentieth-century cinematic master Alfred Hitchcock provides an example to illustrate narrative technique. For one thing, a great deal of Hitchcock’s work was directly...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
While eNotes can't do your homework for you, we can absolutely get you on the right track to complete this assignment! Let's start with tone. The tone of a piece is the speaker's attitude and or...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator is a classic example of an unreliable narrator, because he is telling the entire story himself and there is no objective narration to back up his assertions. The first lines of the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe uses irony to help develop suspense. Much of this irony is dramatic irony--situations in which characters are unaware of information to which the reader is privy....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
At the beginning of W. W. Jacob's classic short story "The Monkey's Paw," Mr. White is playing his son, Herbert, in a game of chess and puts his king in "unnecessary perils." In an attempt to...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” frequently mentions time, particularly when informing the reader of how slowly and cautiously he proceeded. He says that he would open the old man’s door at...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," who, like most of Poe's narrators, is thoroughly unreliable, claims to have loved the old man. (That would be the old man whom he brutally murdered. Imagine...
