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The Tell-Tale Heart
Insanity or madness is a central theme throughout much of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. In his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it is in the narrator’s forceful protestations in defense of his...
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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
Poe wants us to get inside the tortured mind of a murderer, the better to understand him. The style in which he writes "The Tell-Tale Heart" constantly pushes us to an emotional response in the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
At the end of the story, the narrator hears his victim's heart beating underneath the floorboards. His heightened sensitivity to imagined sounds demonstrates his paranoia and mental instability....
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Literature
Edgar Allan Poe's use of onomatopoeia is rather subtle in "The Tell-Tale Heart," but it is present in at least three places after the narrator has killed the old man whose eye had disturbed him so...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator's internal conflict grows more and more tense as he begins to believe that the police officers who have arrived at his door and sit, unknowingly, atop the body of the murdered old man...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The typical Gothic setting is exotic. Many of the Gothic novels were set in either the remote past—especially the medieval or Gothic period—or in locales remote from the ordinary lives of their...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
One of the most significant pieces of evidence that it is the old man's vulture eye that seems to compel the narrator to kill him is that the narrator admits to having no other motive for murder....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Toward the end of the story, after the narrator has killed, dismembered, and hidden the body of the old man in order to rid himself of the "vulture eye," he hears a knocking at his door. Though it...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
One of our first clues that the narrator is not in his right mind is that he has become obsessed with the old man's "vulture eye," as he calls it. He says that once he conceived of the idea to...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Gothic texts combine fiction, horror, and death to prompt readers to feel extreme emotion, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" employs darkness and gloom to this effect. When the narrator describes the way...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The term diction simply refers to the author's word choice. Authors can choose formal or informal words, ones with Latinate or Germanic roots, and common or rare terms. Another important choice in...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
I believe that the question is asking if it is possible that there could be an alternative title to Helen Keller's autobiography The Story of My Life. Yes, there could be alternative titles. I'm...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story "The Telltale Heart" was published in 1850. Its unreliable narrator -- in an apparent effort to persuade the reader that he is not insane -- recounts his...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
A critical reading of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" differs from a plot summary in using the tools and techniques of literary criticism. As you complete such an assignment, you should begin by...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
When the police first arrive at the narrator's apartment, he is feeling supremely confident; he is so confident, in fact, that he brings in some chairs for the officers and places them directly...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
After the narrator has assured us many times that he is not insane, and he's described his repetition of movements and behaviors over seven nights as well as how he's lied to the old man to prevent...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Irony is one of the most commonly-used techniques in "The Tell-Tale Heart." Here are four examples from the text: In the first paragraph, the narrator declares that he is not mad but then proceeds...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
A simile is a figure of speech that uses "like" or "as" to compare two different things. In this example from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," it's important to look at the lines that came...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The rising action of this story consists of the vast majority of the text. It includes the narrator's introduction, his account of the old man, his motivation for and intention to kill the old...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Some people are superstitious because they believe in some type of spirituality or they feel that there are supernatural forces that interact with the natural world. Some people are superstitious...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In the end, it is the narrator's own heart that he hears, not the old man's. The old man has been dismembered and buried beneath the floor boards, and so the sound cannot be coming from him....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator murders an old man he lives with, dismembers the body, and buries it under the floor. As the narrator contemplates the murder, standing in...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Two traits of the narrator are insanity and paranoia. That the narrator is insane is very clear. You can tell he is insane because he thinks that his roommate has an evil eye. Then he kills him....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narration in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is in the first person. However, the relationship between the narrator and the old man is not clear. Was he the old man’s son? His servant? Did the old...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The central idea shared by these two stories is that it is impossible to escape death. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator develops an aversion to the old man's "vulture eye," a metaphor. The...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
I think the best way to defend your client, the narrator of this story, is to argue he is insane. The narrator is so afraid of death that it has driven him mad. In the first line, the narrator...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator insists that his "caution [and] foresight [and] dissimulation" prove his sanity. In other words, he believes that the patience with which he moves forward with his plan to kill the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
It is important not to confuse the author with the narrator of the story; the narrator is not Poe, and Poe does not commit the dark deeds the narrator describes. However, if you want to know how...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Good question! We get the general impression that the narrator has totally lost touch with reality, but what evidence can we point to that supports this idea? Let's see: 1. "True!—nervous—very,...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
This is a great question. Here is the passage in question: It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
While the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe considers himself clever, most readers conclude that he is insane. The narrator gives several pieces of evidence in favor of his being...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The Victorians were especially frightened, and titillated, by the idea of a duality in human nature. The idea that the capability to be both extremely good and extremely bad reside in the same...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, a young man who murders an old man who lives with him. The relationship between the two is unclear—perhaps one is...
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The Cask of Amontillado
The narrator's description of the old man's "vulture eye" and its effect on him certainly helps to create suspense in the story. He says, "Whenever [the eye] fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator actually spends a great deal of time assuring us that he is not crazy in this story. He thinks that we will assume that he is insane, and so he is quick to defend himself against the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
This is a great pairing. To me, the thing these two texts share is a descent into madness, or the idea that there is an understanding of things that transcends reason. Both texts share the theme of...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The "Tell-tale Heart's" narrator wants, first of all, to convince the reader that he is not insane. He says that he is nervous, not "mad." He says that his senses, especially his hearing, are...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator murders an elderly man and disposes of his body under his floor. When three policemen knock at his door, he lets them in, confident that...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The "tell-tale heart" in Poe's short story most definitely belongs to the narrator. The narrator thinks that he has an "over-acuteness of the sense[s]" because he believes that he can hear the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The moral of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that we should not commit crimes because, in the end, our own sense of guilt will expose us. In this story, the narrator takes cares of an elderly man but...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In the opening paragraph, the narrator tries to convince his listener that he is not mad (crazy). He admits to having a disease but he claims that the disease has made his senses sharper. We have a...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator believes he will not get caught because he thinks that he's pulled off the perfect crime and that his capacity for dissimulation is greater than everyone else's. After he has killed...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator invites the officers who have come to investigate the cry his neighbors heard to sit directly over the spot where he has buried the corpse of the old man, his victim. Before long,...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" lives with an older man, a man he claims to love, a man who "had never wronged [him]." It is possible that this man is the narrator's father, but we never...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," a narrator tells the story of an old man he is caring for, whom he eventually kills. From the start, he addresses the reader (by using second person-you)...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe's story is about secrets -- secret feelings, and secret deeds. So, if we think about discovery as "finding" something, in a way the story is about the fear of being "found out" or discovered....
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator claims he has a light heart when he answers the door to let in the police. At this point in the story, he has escaped the horror he perceives in the vulture eye of the old man. Even...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
What seems to be most important about Poe's choice of a first-person narrator that is unreliable and a participant in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is his ability to convey the very thing the speaker...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart" has a beginning that immediately pulls the reader in. A lot of that is due to the mood and tone set by the unreliable narrator. Quick explanation of...
