Internal Conflict In Poe's The Tell Tale Heart

“The Tell Tale Heart’s” narrator began the short story with an engaging line, talking about how he has not gone mad. The whole story was surrounded by darkness. This was mainly portrayed by the narrator’s constant talk regarding the murder that he just committed. The narrator was convinced he was sane and had every reason to take apart of the action that he recently did. The idea alone of murder demonstrated maliciousness and pure evilness. The narrator used an abundance of dark diction, “He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever”(Poe 1). He used

The conflict’s the narrator had to deal with were both between himself and with society. The narrator’s internal conflict consisted of him trying to convince himself that he was sane and had every reason to commit the immoral sins of murdering the old man. He murdered this man solely because of his eye, or at least that’s what he kept saying in the short passage. He was having intense thoughts about committing this crime and trying to convince himself and society that he did this for multiple reasons and that his reasons were 100% justifiable. He constantly had a battle with himself to solely make himself feel like that actions he took upon were okay. Towards the end of the story, the narrator was confronted with police officers at his door. He had an external conflict when he saw them outside and assumed they knew something about what he had done. He got himself very worked up even though the police officers did not say that he was a suspect, the narrator convinced himself that they knew the terrible things he had done. When they came into the house he became extremely tense and nervous that the police would realize the sins he committed. He began to imagine the sound of the old man’s heart; he thought it sounded like a ticking watch. The sound of this was all made up because the man was already dead and there was no possibility that he actually heard his heart beating, getting louder and

Young Goodman Brown is known as an American Romanticism which is usually a gothic or dark romance. Young Goodman Brown, the protagonist, left his wife to travel and as he did, he saw a lot of signs of evil and darkness in the forest he entered on the journey. Young Goodman Brown met many people in the forest that were tempting him to do anti-Christian things. These were signs to him that the devil might be upon him in the forest. On Young Goodman Brown’s journey to the forest, he was confronted by many things that resembled darkness, “He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overheard; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude” (Hawthorne 2). The author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, uses a lot of dark diction, almost foreshadowing something to happen. Hawthorne uses words like ‘dreary’, ‘darkened’, ‘gloomiest’, ‘creep’, ‘lonely’, etc. These words set up the tone of the story which is often known as dark or evil. Hawthorne writes about Puritan community and he sees human nature as dark and views nonhuman nature as dark and evil