Tell-Tale Heart: A Descent into Madness
Edgar Allan Poe may be considered one of the founders of American Gothic Literature. His obsession with the macabre and his ability to explore the psychological repercussions of perceived danger inspired him to write various short stories including "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe explores the events that lead the unnamed narrator to devise a plan to murder his neighbor and the subsequent events that lead the narrator to admit his guilt. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe is able to convey that insanity is a great disease of the mind where even the person that is suffering from the madness does not realize that he or she is, in fact, insane but rather believe that he or she is mentally stable.

It may be argued that Poe drew inspiration for many of his mentally unstable character from his…...

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Works Cited

"Dorothea Dix Begins Her Crusade." Mass Moments. Web. Accessed 14 October 2011.

Mayo Clinic Staff. "Paranoid Schizophrenia." Mayo Clinic. 16 December 2010. Web.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama,

and Writing. Compact Interactive Edition. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Giola, eds. New York: Pearson Longman, 2010. Print.

Even the narrator himself appears to be tensioned concerning his account on what happened in the murder room. hereas his initial narrative is rather slow, he picks up the pace as the storyline progresses, showing that he is discomforted with the overall state of affairs.
Although the narrator describes the chain of events leading to the murder and the crime itself as if he would transmit a confession, the fact that he does not keep a steady rhythm makes it difficult for readers to keep up or even to believe him. The fact that the murder story is told with such lucidity virtually makes readers ignore details and concentrate on the more abstract elements of the narrative: the "vulture eye," the heartbeat, and the fact that the narrator constantly stresses how he is perfectly sane.

From the narrator's perspective, everything related to his over-sensitivity actually demonstrates that he cannot be insane.…...

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Works cited:

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1843. "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" intentionally mystifies the reader by demanding respect for his narratorial authority while constantly calling his own judgment and sensory perceptions into question. The effect is to create a sense of suspicion surrounding the narrator which is confirmed not when he murders the old man, but when he reveals the madness which causes him to hear the old man's heart beating. In this way, the story uses the narrator as a way of questioning the reader's assumptions regarding sanity and the role of narrator, because the story seems to suggest that readers are quite content with murderous narrator, and that the true "horror" of the story is the textual ambiguity created by the narrator's madness. By examining the instances in which the narrator seems to break from reality, it will be possible to see how the story uses these…...

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Works Cited

Pillai, Johann. "Death and Its Moments: The End of the Reader in History." Edgar Allen Poe's

"The Tell-Tale Heart" and Other Stories. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York, NY: Infobase,

2009. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Complete Tales and Poems. Vintage Books ed. New

Tell-Tale Heart
Philosophy of Composition in the "Tell-Tale Heart"

The central elements of this philosophy used by Edgar Allan Poe are length, method, and unity of effect (Xroads 2013). In all of his works, he advises writers to follow a set of criteria for producing literature. These are to plan the written product from the beginning to the end of the literature before they embark into writing anything. The end should always be in their overall focus. y keeping the end in mind, they can set the tone and lay out the details. While they do this, they should also determine the effect they want to make on their readers. The conclusion should constantly remain in mind. The literary piece should be short enough to be read with interest in one sitting by readers. It should not be too long that readers must put it aside and return to it another time.…...

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BIBLIORAPHY

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell-ale Heart. Bantam Classic, 1983

Xroads. The Philosophy of Composition. University of Virginia, 2013. Retrieved on January 10, 2013 from  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/composition.html

This short story, as well as Poe's other works, reveals his upbringing and focuses on sick mothers and guilty fathers.
Gothic literature, the form of the short story, became known in ritain in the 18th century. It delves into the dark side of human experience and there finds death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts and haunted places. It was Poe who brought the literary form to America. American Gothic literature present a culture afflicted by poverty and slavery through characters with various deformities, like insanity and melancholy. He introduced a specific Gothic form from his own experiences in Virginia and other slaveholding territories. His works represent the tensions of the black and white struggle issues of his time. He skillfully writes haunting and mysterious narratives, which cloud the boundary between the real and the imagined.

Character Analysis - in the narrator, Poe posits love and hate as proceeding from the same soul. Poe…...

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Bibliography

Poe, Edgar Allan. Tell-Tale Heart. Mass market paperback. Bantam Classics, February 1, 1983

It first appears when he shines the lantern's light on the old man's eye. It is the lantern shining on the eye that spurs him to kill, in contrast to the previous nights where the eye had remained closed. The beating heart is the narrator's response to the desire to kill -- a reminder that the old man is a human being.
The narrator misinterprets the beating heart and kills the old man, but the heart does not stop beating. The old man's humanity has not been extinguished with his life. In his subconscious, the narrator realizes this, which is why the heart torments him. Cognizant of the old man's humanity, the narrator thus retains a fragment of his own. The heart's beating ultimately compels his confession. In this way, his conscience speaks to him. The sane part of the narrator feels guilt over the act, and the confession is…...

The only exception here is "The Black Cat" narrator who initially is very sympathetic and then becomes increasingly insane as he indulges in alcohol. His wife is extremely sympathetic and likeable, and so, he murders her, as if to punctuate the fact that he is insane. A woman in the stories might have detracted from the central themes of madness, murder, and mayhem, but each characters is lonely (even "The Black Cat" narrator who stays away from home on a regular basis), and so, they are compelled toward evil instead of compelled toward goodness and family.
In conclusion, all of these stories share a first-person narrator who confesses to a heinous crime by the end of the story. They are all mad or insane, and they all commit a horrible crime and then confess it. One even gets away with it. They all have a subconscious need to tell about…...

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References

Fisher, Benjamin F. "Poe and the Gothic Tradition." The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hayes, Kevin J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Magistrale, Tony. Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Thirty-Two Stories. Ed. Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000.

Tell-Tale Heart
The Reflection of the Soul in Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart"

Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" appeared a decade after Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" in Russia and twenty years before Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, whose protagonist essentially become the archetypal anti-hero of modern literature. Between the American and the Russian is the whole continent of Europe, and it stands to reason that while on both sides of the continent literary characters were "going mad," something on the continent must have been happening to promote this change. This paper will analyze Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" and show how it reflects (through character, symbol, and irony) the mania of the Romantic/Enlightenment Age in which it was rooted.

Poe's own life is as full of melancholy and darkness as his many tales and poems. Born in Boston, Poe's life kept mainly to the Eastern Coast (he died in Baltimore). His mother died when he was still…...

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Works Cited

Hecker, William J. Private Perry and Mister Poe: The West Point Poems. Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Print.

Kyziridis, Theo. "Notes on the History of Schizophrenia." German Journal of Psychiatry, 2005. Web. 7 Aug 2011.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. NY: Cooper Square Press,

1992. Print.

The narrator in this tale internalizes "elements of anxiety and fear pushed to an unrelenting extreme" (269). e can see this extreme in the narrator's thought processes as he continues to watch the old man's eye. For instance, he says:
It was open -- wide, wide open -- and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness -- all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray, as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot. (Poe 2)

Here we see how the narrator's anxiety has pushed him to an extreme in this scene, a prelude to the old man's murder. The anxiety is produced by the eye and only intensifies as the narrator thinks of it.

This…...

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Works Cited

Burduck, Michael. "Fear as a Theme in Poe's Work." Readings on Edgar Allan Poe. San Diego: Greenhaven Press. 1998.

Parini, Jay. et al. American Writers. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 2003.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Minnesota: Amaranth Press: 1984.

Sullivan, Jack, ed. The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc. 1986.

ell-ale Heart
As the class notes say, "Romanticism or Romantic movement is predominantly pre-occupied with Imagination -- an escape from the world of reality/pain. Poe's story, "he ell-ale Heart," ignores Romantic styles of fiction popular during his day.

Instead, Poe leaves romantic literary notions of escape behind and instead leads us into a Gothic trap from which there will be no escape -- the tortured mind of someone driven by madness to commit a murder. Since the story takes place entirely within the narrator's mind, we experience the mental anguish of the murderer as he becomes more and more overwhelmed by the setting -- his maddened brain. Just as the narrator has no escape from his dark fate, the reader is given no pretense that the story will resolve in anything but in dark and horrible actions.

he narrator of the story senses that he is trapped within his own mind, and…...

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The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear his heart beginning to pound. He believes it to be the heart of the old man hidden under the floorboards, and he believes that everyone can hear it. His fractured mind has revealed his crime in spite of his best efforts. His heart has told the tale.

The narrator might want to romantically "fade far away," "dissolve" and "quite forget" the old man's eye (class notes), but instead, we are relentlessly drawn into a gothic nightmare. There is no chance for him to escape from his tortured reality. He is compulsively drawn to look at the old man, and then compulsively drawn to stare at the terrifying pale blue eye, and then obsessively focused on the sound of his own pounding, tell-tale heart.

Pritchard, Hollie. 2003. "Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart.'" The Explicator, March 22.

Poe's Tell-Tale Heart
Historical Critique of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart"

To understand Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," it may be beneficial to first understand the historical context within which it appears. Gothic horror was much in vogue with the popular reading public of the mid-19th century. Indeed, Poe's short story was published a decade after another story about a madman was published on the other side of the world in Russia -- "Diary of a Madman," a tale which humorously recorded a Russian man's descent into madness. Such characters were popular on both sides of the world as a result of the immensely popular Romantic movement that had followed the Age of Enlightenment and given birth to such fascinatingly horrific creatures as Frankenstein's monster. hile in Europe and on both sides of the world literary characters were failing to evince themselves as upright and sane citizens, something must have been happening to promote…...

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Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel. Notes on Some Other Plays of Shakespeare. Bartelby.com. Web.

28 Nov 2011.

Kyziridis, Theo. "Notes on the History of Schizophrenia." German Journal of Psychiatry, 2005. Web. 28 Nov 2011.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Web. 28 Nov 2011.

Unreliable narration in "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe is an example of a horror story which primarily evolves through the use of psychological drama. The central protagonist commits a murder and is compelled to confess by his hallucination that the dead man's heart is still beating beneath the floorboards where he interred him, even though the narrator is really likely only hearing his own heart throbbing away. The story demonstrates how the human mind can create its own prison and how subjective human experience can be: what the protagonist perceives is not actually the truth despite his insistence he is sane: "How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

The unreliable character of the protagonist is established early on, which immediately makes the reader suspicious of his justification of the murder in…...

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Work Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Web. 2 Nov 2015.

Introduction and summary This short story is based on an unidentified narrator who defends his sanity while confessing to a killing of an old man. The motivation for the killing is only the fear he has for the old man’s pale blue eyes. In a detailed narration of his cautions and forethought killing of the old man, the narrator constantly argues he is not mad on account of this measured and cool criminal action, which arguably, are not attributes of the mad. This paper is a literary analysis of the tell-tale heart narration by Poe. The primary theme in the story is guilt and madness, which is clear all through the narration. While the narrator constantly defends his crime and madness, he eventually confesses to the crime.
The unnamed narrator begins the story with a direct address to the reader and acknowledges that he is nervous and argues that he is not…...

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Works cited

Brittain, Robert P. \\"The sadistic murderer.\\" Medicine, Science and the Law 10.4 (1970): 198-207. Web.

Leenaars, Antoon A. \\"Suicide: A multidimensional malaise.\\" Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 26.3 (1996): 221-236. Web.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The tell-tale heart. American Studies at the University of Virginia, 2002. Web.

His making his way to Memphis illustrates that he is much like his bother in that he feels compelled to do the right thing.
The pieces differ in their approach toward the pain of the war. Stevens view is from a distance; we know what happens in war but maybe if we stand far enough away, we will not be touched by it personally. A soldier dies but even the wind and the clouds move through the sky, untouched. In "Two Soldiers," Faulkner focuses on the pain of separation with Pete's little brother and mother. Their anguish is heavy and real and it is enough to make a little boy to walk 80 miles to Memphis to be with his brother. Stevens sees the pain of war but he also sees how easy it is to overlook. Faulkner shows us how the pain of loss is too real to ignore.

Both…...

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Works Cited

Stevens, Wallace. "The Death of a Soldier." American War Poetry: An Anthology. Lorrie Goldensohn, ed. 2006. Print.

Faulkner, William. "Two Soldiers." Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage

Books. 1976. Print.

hat brought him joy now eminds him of the sadness that exists in the world. It is still the same beautiful place but it gives him a "presence that disturbs me with the joy of elated thoughts; a sense sublime/of something far more deeply interfused" (94-6). There are two distinct experiences happening here and through poetry, ordsworth can appreciate both of them without preference.
Both experiences have their benefits. The poet's adult experience allows him to contmplate everything he has known before where as a young boy, his imagination was limited by experience. Now, experience reveals to him to beauty and impossibility of youth. hat he knows know is a presence existing in the "light of the setting suns, / and the round ocean and the living air, / and the blue sky, and in the mind of man" (96-8). As a grown man, the poet can connect the consciouness…...

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Works Cited

Wordsworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." The Norton

Anthology of English Literature. Vol I.M.H. Abrams, ed. New York W.W. Norton

and Company. 1986.

The essay outline of "The Tell-Tale Heart" can explore themes of guilt and paranoia by examining the following points:

I. Introduction
- Brief summary of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
- Thesis statement introducing the themes of guilt and paranoia in the story

II. Explanation of the narrator's guilt
- Description of the narrator's obsession with the old man's eye
- Analysis of the narrator's feelings of guilt leading to the murder of the old man
- Discussion of how guilt manifests in the narrator's behavior and thoughts

III. Exploration of the narrator's paranoia
- Examination of the narrator's heightened senses and paranoia after the murder
- Analysis....