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Suspense In The Tell Tale Heart

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Everyone knows that feeling of suspense. Sitting on the edge of your seat not knowing what 's going to happen or when. Your heart beats and you become anxious waiting for something. It can flood you with adrenaline causing you to be extremely entertained or even frightened. Well, in the story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe does an incredible job of creating teeth chattering suspense. The narrator is a mad man who knows an old man with a cataract eye. He believes that this eye is evil, so he wants to kill the old man. Craft moves such as inner thinking, symbolism, and description are used to build suspense. The story is written in first person, but there are parts that can differentiated from that and are instead inner thinking. Near the end, the narrator is sitting with the cops while saying things not aloud and in his head rather than just directing the story. “Was it possible? They heard not!--no, no! They heard!--they suspected!--they knew!--they were making a mockery of my horror!--this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony--Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” By having thoughts like these, it is clear to see that he is becoming extremely anxious and nervous. It builds suspense by making you wonder what’s going to happen next. By the tension he is feeling a hint is dropped that really soon he will most likely confess. Next, a technique used to build suspense is symbolism. In this particularly story, the beating
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