Tell Tale Heart Guilt Essay

Guilt Within The Tell Tale Heart

Have you ever made a decision then a couple days later you feel something inside that is just urging to get out and tell someone what you did? That feeling is guilt. Odds are a person hasn’t killed another human, but that’s what our narrator is feeling within The Tell Tale Heart. The narrator commits a heinous crime which he cannot hide any longer since the guilt began to eat away at his morals. Speaking of morals, isn’t it strange how our morals can be changed or altered just by an idea we believe in? In The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, Poe creates a paranoid tone and a suspenseful mood to convey the message that guilt can overtake our morals because in the story the narrator cannot fight the guilt anymore and must confess to his crime.

Poe uses guilt within the story to create a suspenseful mood. He accomplishes this by utilizing the reader's interpretation of the story to

Poe is able to do this by capitalizing on his characters emotions and morals, in order to portray to the reader that the narrator is displaying a paranoid tone. One example of a paranoid tone within the story is when the narrator states “...and a new anxiety seized me-the sound would be heard by a neighbor” (Poe). This sentence creates a paranoid tone because of the crime he has committed. Since he killed the old man, he is worried that his last scream will be heard by a neighbor which causes paranoia. This eventually leads to the police arriving at the narrator’s house where he eventually goes against his morals and confesses to his murder. Going back to the narrator’s moral beliefs, when the story first began, he believed that how ridding his life of the old man’s eye was not against what he believed in, but after he kills the old man and he is pursued by the local police his morals change to where he knows it was wrong to end the old man’s life so he must redirect his beliefs and