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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...
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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
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...
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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...
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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...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
There are several ways to look at this question, and a number of slants and contexts within the narration itself to inform your answer. The premise of the question seems a little "either/or" to me;...
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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
The narrator describes the eye as being like the eye of a vulture. Vultures are scavangers that swoop in upon dead animals to feast on the carcass. Thus, they are ever-present and diligent. They...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe intends his readers to infer that the narrator of the story is not sane. Evidence of this is the narrator's question: "but why will you say that I am mad?" Normally, people don't start a tale...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is an exploration of the theme of madness. It is perhaps so thought-provoking because the protagonist's madness is so inexplicable and so terrible. Indeed,...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is written from the first person point of view throughout, but the narrator's personal point of view, in terms of his tone and his feelings about the events he narrates,...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator says that his reason for killing the old man is that he does not like the old man's "pale blue eye, with a film over it" - he calls it a "vulture eye" and an "Evil Eye". For the first...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Interesting question. The point of view in this story is fairly consistent throughout, but Poe changes it subtly to increase the tension of the story being told, and also to underscore the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The unreliable narrator of Poe's classic short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" attempts to convince his audience that he is sane as he elaborates on how he plotted and killed the unsuspecting old man....
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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
The unreliable narrator is a favorite device of Edgar Allan Poe, and the narrator who tells us the story of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is the quintessence of unreliability. The first thing he does is to...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
There is no evidence to suggest that the narrator's actions were justified. The unreliable narrator is depicted as a mentally unstable individual, who is completely out of touch with reality and...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The mentally deranged narrator initially decides to brutally murder the defenseless old man because he cannot stand looking at his "vulture" eye, which is pale blue and has a film over it. The...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," a mentally unhinged narrator reveals how he cruelly murdered an old man. The narrator spends several nights slowly opening the bedroom door...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
It is interesting to think about how the old man felt about narrator creeping into his room on the eighth night—the night the old man is murdered. We know from the narrator's detailed description...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
On the eighth night, the mentally deranged narrator sneaks into the old man's room and attempts to open the lantern when the old man suddenly wakes up. The narrator claims that he stood perfectly...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe contributed nearly one thousand stories, essays, reviews, articles, columns, and literary criticism to newspapers and other periodicals during his life. Poe contributed his short...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart', like many of Poe's other stories, uses the device of a self-confessedly nervous and hypersensitive narrator. The actual action of the story takes places...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The two main symbols in the story are the "tell-tale heart," which is the heart of the dead and dismembered man that beats so loudly that the guilty murderer can hear it, and the old man's "vulture...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator says that he was bothered by the old man's eye, the "eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it." He says that the look of it makes his "blood [run] cold," and so he "made...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
"The Tell-tale Heart" is told from the point of view of the killer. This point of view is particularly effective because it allows Poe (and the reader) to get inside the head of a madman as he...
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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
In the famous short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator carefully plots and carries out the murder of an old man for no other reason than that he doesn't like the old man's...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe reveals very little about the narrator's identity in his classic short story "Tell-Tale Heart." The narrator is depicted as unreliable, mentally unstable, and neurotic. The narrator mentions...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
One could argue that Poe's use of syntax and diction in his short story most effectively develop the central theme of madness throughout "The Tell-Tale Heart." Syntax refers to the way words and...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Tone refers to the specific attitude the author took with regard to a character, place or topic. The reader understands the author's intended meaning, feeling and perspective created in the text...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In the first paragraph, the narrator repeats the words "very," "how," and "heard." His nervous repetitions undercut the idea that he is, as he claims, "calm." He comes across as overwrought and on...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Although the main charactor of the classic Edgar Allan Poe short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," is a madman and, thus, an unreliable narrator, we are told that he "loved the old man." The old man...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe's story is a horror story both psychologically and physically. Psychologically, we see the results of madness, how the mind can become so convinced of being persecuted that violence, and even...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
These two short stories are wildly different from each other in both tone and plot. In order to avoid doing the entire assignment for you, I will discuss the primary differences only. In “The...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator is concerned to convince readers that he is not insane. He insists, for example, that his senses are sharp and acute. He says he was and is...
