The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe
Most people around the world have been exposed to some type of gothic tale or ghost story. By gothic, one means that the author emphasizes the grotesque, the mysterious, the desolate, the horrible, the ghostly, and, ultimately, the abject fear that can be aroused in either the reader or in the viewer. Almost everyone is familiar with such characters as Dr. Frankenstein's monster and Count Dracula, two current pop culture horror characters who evolve from the gothic traditions. Published mainly in the 1830s and 1840s, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe have come to represent the height of 19th century tales of the macabre. One of the American Romantics, Poe showed an interest in the power of emotions. Some of his most prevalent elements can be seen
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As he waits, the heartbeat seems to be beating louder and louder. As a terrible anxiety seizes the narrator, the narrator is afraid that the neighbors might hear the old man's heartbeat. The heart’s sound increases by the second, until the narrator cannot stand it any longer and rushes into the room with the lantern and pulls the old man onto the floor and kills him by dropping his own bed onto him. Right after the narrator kills the old man, he can still hear the heart beating, for many minutes, with a muffled sound. When the police arrive and the narrator and the police officers start talking, the narrator starts hearing things, a ringing in his head, and he chatters more to try to cover it up. However, as he talks, he realizes that the sound is not coming from his head and is in fact inside the room. It is that familiar ticking, that beating, of the old man’s heart. Poe makes it clear that the beating heart is not just the narrator listening to his own heart, or imagining the sound in his head, “until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears” (Heart 18). An unexplainable noise that grows louder and louder can only be the work of the supernatural. For the narrator even believes that the police officers can hear the beating too, and are making a mockery if his horror. Poe cleverly intertwined the idea of the supernatural to intensify the insanity of his main
As he waits, the heartbeat seems to be beating louder and louder. As a terrible anxiety seizes the narrator, the narrator is afraid that the neighbors might hear the old man's heartbeat. The heart’s sound increases by the second, until the narrator cannot stand it any longer and rushes into the room with the lantern and pulls the old man onto the floor and kills him by dropping his own bed onto him. Right after the narrator kills the old man, he can still hear the heart beating, for many minutes, with a muffled sound. When the police arrive and the narrator and the police officers start talking, the narrator starts hearing things, a ringing in his head, and he chatters more to try to cover it up. However, as he talks, he realizes that the sound is not coming from his head and is in fact inside the room. It is that familiar ticking, that beating, of the old man’s heart. Poe makes it clear that the beating heart is not just the narrator listening to his own heart, or imagining the sound in his head, “until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears” (Heart 18). An unexplainable noise that grows louder and louder can only be the work of the supernatural. For the narrator even believes that the police officers can hear the beating too, and are making a mockery if his horror. Poe cleverly intertwined the idea of the supernatural to intensify the insanity of his main