Introduction
At the beginning of the story, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, readers see the narrator nervous. This type of character is common throughout Poe’s fiction. The character claims that he is not insane, but on further reading, the narrator reveals his illness and madness.
Through his hypersensitivity, he could sense things in heaven, hell, and earth. Such a feature is the reason why the narrator becomes obsessed with the old man’s gaze and has a desire to kill him. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe is a story in the genre of horror, the main theme of which is the commission of a murder and the confession of it through great torments of consciousness, which are depicted through irony and metaphor.
Analysis
This story is one of the shortest but quite deep and ambiguous explorations of male paranoia. The story becomes intense as it depicts the way the victim is persecuted. The narrator plays the role of a beast of prey, which, through human intelligence, has received a higher level of human effort.
Poe’s “murderer“ is depicted from the perspective of a type of grotesque anomaly, and in a sense, the narrator is worse than the beast. The author deliberately uses murder’s terror before killing the old man to show to make an accent on the horror of this act.
The most interesting element is that the story begins at the end. The beginning is similar to a conversation with one or more people, so there is an assumption that the narrator is confessing to a guardian, judge, journalist, doctor, or psychiatrist. After this element, the narrator explores the terror, or rather the memories of it, as the narrator recounts past events. Thus, this writing indicates that the narrator is trying to rationalize his irrational behavior.
Literary Devices
Metaphor
The main literary elements used by the author are metaphor and irony. In the unfolding of Poe’s story, the reader finds several metaphors. The narrator in Poe’s writing compares the neighbor’s eye using a specific metaphor: “He had the eye of a vulture -a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold“ (Poe 64).
The author compares a neighbor’s eye to a vulture’s one: “a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye“ (Poe 64). This device serves as a linguistic substitution to reflect the narrator’s fearfulness and mentally-ill condition, demonstrating the negative association of vultures in terms of people. However, the sight of the old man’s pale, film-covered eye drove him mad, and it became an excuse for murder. A perfectly planned crime leads to remorse and exposure.
Irony
Another literary device presented by the author is irony. The irony of the story is that the narrator is the servant of his own victim. A murderer cannot commit murder when an old man is asleep or closes his eye with a cataract. The guilty conscience of the murderer in the tan, combined with madness, makes him tear up the floor, feeling the heartbeat of the victim.
Conclusion
In conclusion, EdgarAllen Poe’s horror story tells of a murder and confession through the great agony of consciousness. The story is told on behalf of the narrator, whose name is unknown. This man killed an old man who had a cataract in his eye, which became the cause of the tragedy. In his confession, the killer details the path he took before committing the crime and then to his own disclosure.
Work Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell Tale Heart. 2013.