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The Tell Tale Heart And The Landlady Comparison

1833 Words8 Pages

Ash Keating
Ms.Shackle
Honors Language Arts 8
10 January 2023

“The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Landlady” Literary Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” In the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, there is a madman who throughout the story tries to prove that he isn’t mad. He decides in the very beginning that he will kill an old man because of his vulture-like eye. He ends up successfully killing the old man, but he gets paranoid and ends up confessing. In the other short story “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, there is a young traveler looking for a place to stay, he comes across a boarding house that has a cheap price …show more content…

Towards the end we learn that no one has been there for over two years, but Mr.Mulholland and Mr.Temple are both still on the third floor. Throughout their writing, both Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl use narrative voice and literary devices to develop a suspenseful mood. Edgar Allan Poe uses a first-person unreliable narrator to create a sense of fear and suspense throughout “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The point of view is told through the eyes of the mad man. This creates a suspenseful mood by giving us a glimpse into his mind, we get to learn how he thinks and how crazy he really is. In this scene the madman has once again gone into the old man’s room during the night. But this time the old man hears him, he doesn’t go back to sleep he just lays there and listens. Knowing this the narrator stays as still as a statue for a whole hour, while thinking about how fearful the old man must be. “I knew what …show more content…

The point of view in third person limited creates a suspenseful mood by hinting things to the reader that the characters don’t know. In this scene Billy Weaver is traveling and looking for a place to stay, when he gets a recommendation for The Bell and Dragon hotel. While walking there Billy passes by a boarding house, he starts to contemplate whether he should stay there or at the recommended spot. He decides to check out the other place before deciding, but as he’s leaving his eye catches a sign in the boarding house window. “He was in the act of stepping back and turning away from the window when all at once his eye was caught and held in the most peculiar manner by the small notice that was there. BED AND BREAKFAST, it said. BED AND BREAKFAST, BED AND BREAKFAST, BED AND BREAKFAST. Each word was like a large black eye staring at him through the glass, holding him, compelling him, forcing him to stay where he was and not to walk away from that house” (Dahl 12). This illustrates the author setting a suspenseful mood because by making the main character very attached to a certain house we as the reader are left wondering why that particular place is so important. The suspense of not knowing makes us continue reading to find out exactly what is going on. In this scene Billy has entered the boardinghouse and has met the landlady. When he

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