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The Tell Tale Heart Literary Analysis

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In Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart, Poe writes about how his characters are driven to commit murder and how their guilt eats them alive. The dark plots used is his writings exemplify the threshold of the unknown through the way that individuals are viewed as evil. All of his writings have some sort of violence that is driven by supernatural occurrences. The man in The Tell-Tale Heart has an eye that is scary and seen as potential evil that drives the narrator crazy and eventually causes murder. Poe uses romantic characteristics in his texts by having dark plots that include murder, funerals, and mental and physical torture that regards humanity by showing how people react to even the smallest situations. The threshold of the unknown is expressed …show more content…

These murders are only thought of and happen because of supernatural occurrences. Poe’s poems, since they are romantic, are always dark and revolve around death and torture. Poe’s writings are gothic and the plots of gothic literature are always about murder, funerals, and torture. “Above all was the sense of hearing acute. (The narrator) heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. (The narrator) heard many things in hell,” the guilt of the murder tortured the narrator and made him believe that he was hearing things that were not real. The plots that the narrator makes to murder the man and get away with it are very in depth. Guilt also causes the narrator to think of more wicked schemes than before. “If still you think (the narrator) mad, you will think so no longer when (the narrator) describe the wise precautions (the narrator) took for the concealment of the body,” reveals the attention to detail the narrator had when carrying out the murder. As time goes on, the guilt makes the character conscious of every move they make. What he did is always on his mind and he is constantly wondering about what might happen next. “(The narrator) kept quite still and said nothing...hearkening to the death watches in the wall,” the narrator shows the consciousness of his actions and how guilt forces him into thinking that the hidden body is watching their every step. The murder that was committed shows that supernatural occurrences do cause characters to go insane and take actions that usually would not have been thought

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