The tell tale heart by A. Poe - story comment

write an original criticism on the tell tale heart

Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Much of Edgar Allen Poe's writing deals with murderous, dark people. The narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is definitely one of those people. The story is about a guy who is living with this old man with a pale blue eye with a thin white film over it which "resembled that of a vulture." The story starts out with the narrator saying that he wasn't really sure why he wanted the old man dead, he did not hate him or have anything against him, but he thought it was because of the eye. The narrator goes on to tell how he waited seven nights before he would watch the old man sleep waiting to see the eye. After the old man finally opens that eye, the narrator describes how he kills the old man and hides his body underneath the floorboards. The police then come and feeling confidant the narrator leads them around the house like nothing is wrong, but his overwhelming guilt and the fact that he thinks he hears the old man's heart beat is too much for him and he breaks.

In the story, the narrator is constantly describing that he knows how the old man feels, that he's felt the exact same way before. He describes that he's felt the fear that wells up inside his stomach just as the old man feels when he thinks he hears a noise in the night. This suggests that the "eye" of the old man has a double meaning of "I". The old man is created by the narrator because the narrator has a flaw that he doesn't like about himself and he wants to kill. He says in the beginning that he doesn't know why he wants to kill the old man; he just thinks it's the eye, or his own personal flaw. The heartbeat that he keeps hearing is actually his own and his overwhelming sense of guilt. The story ends with him confessing the murder of the old man but it never actually says that the police found the body. The narrator tried to kill apart of himself that he disliked but failed and ended up feeling guiltier than when he started out.

A major part of the story is how obsessed with time the narrator is. He associates the beating of the heart with the ticking of the clock and it drives him crazy. He also says that he waits at the old man's door precisely at midnight every night and times seems to almost come to a complete stop as he murders the old man. Every detail of the story takes place at an exact time and the narrator includes this in his account of the murder.

The narrator in Edgar Allen Poe's "A Tell-Tale Heart" is a very disturbed person who has flaws about himself that he very much dislikes which drives him to the point of insanity. He becomes a murderer of himself in a metaphorical way. The story overall is a great story to read it's just very different from other writings of its time. Poe took writing to a whole new level with this piece of work.

"The story is about a guy who is living with this old man with a pale blue eye with a thin white film over it"

The story is about a gentleman who is living with an old man who has a pale blue eye with a thin white film over it.

It is good just considering revising and make sure to not use so much repetition of words.

Be careful with this. The statement is not true. The basis of Poe's work is that the people in the stories are ordinary people who have dark impulses, and some circumstance drives them into their darker selves.

That being said, your analysis is pretty standard. I'm not sure what you're supposed to do exactly, but I'd take the time issue and really develop it. I'm talking a couple of pages worth. It's that important to the story.

So are the visual and auditory cues. That's another area that can really be developed.

There are a lot of ways you can go with this. I think, unless you've just been asked to give a summary, it would be great if you could take an idea and just go with it. It's more fun, too.

its only supposed to be 2 pages.

Ok. Got it.

The first third of the first page is your introduction. Talk about how people sometimes give in to their darker selves, and the thrill of that (in Poe's characters, it is always thrilling, like a heightened sense of awareness (the weeklong studying of the old man). Use that to lead in to the story, talking about time and the ticking away of time, and the beating of the heart and how it is like the ticking away of time toward death (in all of us, but especially for the old man). This is about a page of intense concentrated writing, mirroring the concentrated plan of the murderer. Finally you have two-thirds of a page to resolve it, the police come, and the young man is still heightened and super-aware, but it is beginning to turn to horror, as it always does.

Save the last 2-3 sentences for a summary.

Then you're done.