The Edgar Allen Poe Text that I find most suspenseful is “The Telltale Heart” because it has an unreliable narrator and an overconfident perpetrator. For example, the narrator tells us that “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?...I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” (Paragraph 1). The narrator tells us that he is very nervous, and can hear everything in earth, heaven and hell, quite clearly revealing that he is mad. Such mental instability keeps the reader in suspense, as the reader does not know what will happen next, because the man will not act on logic and reason, and therefore the reader is forevermore anticipating what will happen next because he/she has no way of predicting it. …show more content…
Because the perpetrator of the act is so arrogant, he increases the possibility of him being caught, and therefore the reader’s mind is flooded with questions. Will he be caught? Will he give himself away? What will happen? They are held in suspense, and await the character’s next move to see how this unbelievably precarious situation will unfold. Because of its unreliable narrator and arrogant perpetrator, I believe “The Telltale Heart” is the most suspenseful of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories, a feeling that Alfred Hitchcock shares