Fear In The Tell Tale Heart

Fear

Imagine somebody staring at another person for hours as they sleep, having no inkling a person was watching their every breath. Poe constructs this sense of fear in The Tell-Tale Heart. Poe creates these types of scenes in countless number of his stories to deliver fear to the audience as they read through many of his stories. Poe establishes fear and dread in a variety of ways. The first way is through the characters in his stories, who may create the sense of fear by the actions they perform, or just the way they communicate with the readers; through the suspense he uses in his stories, causing the reader to wait for something bad to happen; and lastly, through the violence that occurs, with the bloody gore readers can visualize in

Poe did an excellent job creating suspense though the sound effects he put in his writings. In the short story, the narrator used a lot of repetition. This creates suspense for the readers because it shows the readers what the narrator sounds like, and proving how insane the narrator was through how excited he seemed to be to kill the old man. The heartbeat in this short story is one of the best ways Poe used sound devices to create suspense for the readers. In the story, when the narrator was about to kill the old man, he heard his heart beat grow faster and faster. In reality, the heartbeat was most likely not the one of the old man, but the one of himself. This creates fear for the readers because it shows the readers how insane the narrator was, because as the pace of the heartbeat increased, the more angrier the narrator had become. Towards the end of the story, the narrator heard a beetle burrowing through the wood underneath him: “It was a low, dull quick sound—much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (Poe 306). This is a very symbolic part of the story because the sound ended up driving the narrator so insane, he broke down right in front of the officers. Also, the beetle symbolized death in the means of the old man, and it drove the narrator insane from guilt, not only the sound of the beetle. Another way Poe creates suspense in many of his writings is

In the short story, the narrator uses violence to kill the old man. The way in which the narrator kills the old man is he suffocated the old man with his own bed: “I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done” (Poe 305). This gives the readers fear because sometimes violence can lead to death, and many of the readers fear the thought of death, and murderer. The narrator was very calm when he was killing the old man, making the readers sense fear, because the readers then realize that the narrator is completely insane by how calm he was when he took the life of the old man. The reason for violence the narrator used was because of the old mans eye. The narrator had no problems with the old man, but the narrator kills him just because of the old mans appearance. The violence the narrator has done led to his concealment of the body. The narrator tries to tell the readers that he is a sane person by all the precautionary actions he had taken to conceal the body. The readers will be able to tell that the narrator is completely insane, when he thinks it is okay for someone to chop up a dead man: “I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs” (Poe 305). When somebody gets chopped up in a story, it gives the readers a sense of fear because it makes the readers visualize a gory image of an old dead man chopped