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The Tell Tale Heart Literary Devices

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The short story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is a staple in short story literature. This famous story is about an unnamed man who tries to convince himself and the readers that he is innocent after murdering an old man due to his “evil eye.” The man slowly starts to lose his sanity and we can observe this firsthand through the analysis of literary devices. The use of complex literary devices such as symbolism, irony, and dialogue extremely helps to enhance the meaning of the story and allows the reader to see into the mind of the murderer. One of the most popular yet most complex literary devices is symbolism. It is the use of symbols within a story, and whether they are words, people, objects, or actions, they represent a deeper more meaningful …show more content…

This literary device is very prominent in Poe’s short story and is a key to understanding certain moments while helping guide the morals of regret, innocence, and guilt. The first important piece of symbolism occurs when the man finds starts to get irritated by an old man's eye. The eye is covered with a veil, almost like a cataract, that the narrator describes as a vulture eye that “makes [his] blood run cold” (Poe 1). At first, this may just seem like a simple connection, but when taking a deeper look at it, a more complex meaning is discovered. Vultures are very ugly, dangerous, and predatorial animals. So when he describes his eye as a vulture, it is making the connection to an evil being. This causes a rise of hatred and anger within the man that corrupted him, leading to the murder of the old man, starting the snowball effect with the man’s conscience. The second and almost equally as important form of symbolism in the story is very near the end, after the murder and the bulk of the story has already happened. It takes place in the old man's heart while the

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