The Tell Tale Heart Rhetorical Analysis

Edgar Allen Poe, in his short story “ The Tell Tale Heart “, published in 1843, describes, in a harried brusque tone, the effects of guilt and how the truth will always be revealed. With the use of superficial logos to reveal the deteriorating mental state of the narrator and his twisted reasoning, random repetition to show his fascination on detail and rising panic when guilt begins to set in, and juxtaposition to show the narrator’s contradicting and confused concept of love and hate, Poe himself narrates the fall of a psychopath at the hands of guilt. Poe’s appeal to logos to defend the sanity of a murderer, is ironic and paradoxical, in its serving to highlight the narrator’s skewed logic and deteriorating mental state. The logos is