Tell Tale Heart Literary Analysis

Gothic genre was very popular during the early 19th century. The style of stories from gothic genre are often associated with mystery, horror and sadism. The Tell Tale Heart, (1843) is a story written by Edgar Allan Poe with gothic elements woven into it. It is not an everyday thing to read stories that portray the main character as a satanic villain. The story is written in a first person’s point of view where the narrator is the antagonist in the story. The story reveals a maniac who becomes obsessed with an old man’s eye that resembles a vulture and commits an offense by murdering the old man. Hence, Tell Tale Heart is described as a horror story through the components of suspense via lexical features, constructing character and poetic point

For an instance, in the first paragraph nouns such as ‘dreadful’, ‘disease’, ‘destroyed’, ‘haunted’ gives a powerful effect to the readers and also to the story. These nouns are used to describe the strong sense of mental illness that the narrator is facing. Besides that, from the readers’ perspective words such as ‘terror’, ‘hideous’ and ‘shrieked’ seals the atmosphere with fear. The narrator used the phrase ‘hinges creaked’ in paragraph two to describe the way he enters into the old man’s bedroom. Therefore, it gives the readers a sense of fear as the narrator enters into the old man’s bedroom silently to murder him because the phrase is often linked with spookiness or old houses. Thus, the readers are placed into a ‘horror’ field of mind together with suspense because the readers are unsure whether the old man would wake up or

Poe uses the aid of the literary repetition to slow down the speed of the story and to increase the level of anticipation. For an example, Poe uses this technique in the first sentence of his story to get the readers hooked to the story when the narrator opens the story with ‘‘TRUE! —Nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am’. The phrase ‘very, very dreadfully nervous’ creates the suspense that something bad is bound to happen due to the narrator’s nervousness. The adverb ‘dreadful’ in the phrase proves it as it carries out the meaning of something that causes fear, dread or terror. Another example of repetition in the story is when the narrator says ‘I moved it slowly—very, very slowly’ in paragraph two. The narrator stresses on the adjective ‘slowly’ to amplify and give a clear point of how he manages to enter into the old man’s room which adds to the suspense in the story to know whether he manages to disturb the victim’s sleep or