Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'

Ellie Bass EN 222 02 Literature Professor Kimberlee Hall March 9, 2024 The Tell-Tale Heart Close Reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe is a chilling short story about a narrator who kills a man with a strange eye, feels great about what he’s just accomplished, and eventually becomes haunted by the guilt of doing so. He shows those around him that he is calm, cool, and collected, but suddenly makes a switch and starts to believe that the victim’s heart is beating louder and louder until the narrator eventually descends into madness. As the story develops and goes on, the tone, story structure, and word choices all play a role in how the narrator proves to the audience that he is unreliable and that his point of view cannot be trusted.

To illustrate, his tone while describing his plan to kill the old man is very conceited and arrogant. This is shown by his word choices, as he describes his actions at this moment as “courageous”, “bold”, and “stealthy” when he was most likely a nervous wreck. By using these words and others during this part of the text, the narrator is showing us that he truly believes in his plan and in his abilities to execute the plan. He also reuses a lot of words and quotes, further emphasizing his madness and hilarity. Repetition is notably only used when describing the eye of the old man and talking the reader through the killing and how it should be justified. It is also used to make the reader feel the suspense and worry that Poe intended them to feel when writing the text. The imagery in the text also helps the reader feel like they are in the twisted mind of the narrator. The description of the old man's eye is a very good example of how imagery affects our perception of the events and the narrator. Because he describes everything, he does with the level of detail that he uses in the text, he allows us to go further into what he is