The Tell Tale Heart Suspense Essay

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Stories from the horror genre leave little information to the imagination. Although, why do people believe this about most stories. Well authors use the horror genre elements to surprise, excite, and give a reader many emotions while reading. The six kinds of horror genre elements are suspense, foreshadowing, setting, source of horror and type of horror. For instance, let’s look over Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and see how he uses an internal source of horror and suspense in his writing. Without, further ado let’s analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s writing The Tell-Tale Heart. The first horror genre element I noticed in his writing was an internal source of horror. An internal source of horror is when a character's horror is mental. …show more content…

Suspense is a state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen. For instance, page 173 states, “And this I did for seven long nights- every night just at midnight- but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me; but his Evil Eye”. Page 173 has many examples of suspense but, the main one was that he wouldn’t kill the man for seven days. He was safe because, his eye was closed but, this then makes the reader fear for the man because, what if one of his eyes opened. This is also shown on page 173 and it states, “ I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out-“Who’s there?”. This creates suspense because, the reader knows that the narrator has already came into the old man’s room for seven days before this. Although, each one of those nights the man was asleep so the eye was closed, but now he’s and his eye is open and the narrator would only kill him if his vulture eye was open. This then causes the reader to feel anxious and many other emotions that suspense would give you. So, I can conclude that both of these elements were included in The Tell-Tale

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