A Comprehensive Literary Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-Tale Heart

This essay provides a literary analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's 'Tell-Tale Heart,' examining its narrative style, structure, tone, voice, and literary devices. The analysis focuses on the effectiveness of the first-person narrative, the use of foreshadowing and backstories, and the creation of tension and suspicion. It also explores the disjointed sentence structure, repetition, and the use of literary devices like metaphor, epithet, hyperbole, and auditory imagery to depict the narrator's obsessive and potentially insane state. The essay highlights how Poe successfully controls the reader's attention through these techniques, building a tone of tension, suspicion, and excitement. The analysis references several scholarly articles to support its claims, offering a well-rounded perspective on the story's literary merits.

Running head: LITEARARY ANALYSIS OF TELL TALE HEART
Literary Analysis of Tell Tale Heart
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1LITEARARY ANALYSIS OF TELL TALE HEART
Introduction:
The short story “Tell Tale Heart” has been written by the famous author Edgar Allen Poe
and had been published in 1843. The following analysis aims to analyze the story ‘Tell Tale
Heart”, with respect to its narrative style, its structure, tone, voice and also the literary devices
that has been used.
Discussion:
The effectiveness of the story is depended upon the narrative style as well as the
structure. The entire story is told in the first person narrative, by the murderer of the old man.
The author has incorporated the narrative techniques of foreshadowing and back stories in the
tale. According to Caracciolo (2014), the barrater in the story structures the entire plot in a way
where he confesses his committed murder and tries to prove that he is innocent and not insane.
By using the first person narrative and by narrating the story through an unnamed narrator, Poe
effectively creates tension and suspicion giving the reader every authority to discover the
narrator (Abdika, 2018).
Throughout the story, there is a strange tone of excitement as the narrator is unnamed and
he narrates his pre convicted murder. As per the discussion of Amir (2018), the manner in which
he explains his deed creates a tone of anxiety all throughout and in the mind of the readers. The
readers are bound to remain unhinged. Also there is a voice of desperation in the story since the
narrator desperately tries to justify his murder, and the fact that his crime was not a result of
insanity. Thus there is an atmosphere of tension and a tone of nervousness throughout the text.

2LITEARARY ANALYSIS OF TELL TALE HEART
The structure of the sentences in the story “Tell Tale Heart” is very disjointed in nature
and are crisp enough to portray the scattered mind of the narrator. Moreover, there is excessive
use of repetition all throughout which depicts the obsessive character of the narrator. The story
begins in medias res, which is a literary device to pin the readers to the story from the very
beginning. Also the entire story is built on a rhetorical question with ample use of literary
devices such as metaphor, epithet , hyperbole and amplification. The author also makes use of
auditory imagery in the text (Toikkanen, 2017). One of the example of this imager is that when
the narrator turns insane, he becomes obsessed with the sound of the heart beating of his
neighbor’s. thus the sound of the heart is the representative of the anxious nature of the narrator
and the fact that he had been driven to madness finally.
Conclusion:
Thus from the above discussion of the “Tell Tale Heart”, it can be concluded that the
story. beginning in the middle of the narrative and with the first person unnamed narrator,
successfully controls the attention of the readers. The author very effectively with the structure,
the literary devices and the voice, build a tone of tension , suspicion, and excitement in the minds
of the readers.

3LITEARARY ANALYSIS OF TELL TALE HEART
Reference list:
ABDIKA, D. (2018). a structural analysis of the main character in poe's" the tell-tale
heart". Skripsi, 1(321411022).
Amir, S. (2018). Stylistic Analysis of the Short Story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan
Poe. Angloamericanae Journal, 3(1), 18-25.
Caracciolo, M. (2014). Tell-tale rhythms: Embodiment and narrative discourse. Storyworlds: A
Journal of Narrative Studies, 6(2), 49-73.
Toikkanen, J. (2017). Auditory Images in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The Edgar
Allan Poe Review, 18(1), 39-53.