The Tell Tale Heart Rhetorical Analysis

All humans possess the great, God given ability of free will, thought, and the power to engage one’s mind to do whatever they please. Although to many, some individuals may become trapped within their own mind, which will cause one to go mad, and no longer carry the ability to comprehend neither the world around them or themselves. In the Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator, whom in the story is a mentally unstable caretaker, makes his mental instability present to the reader by utilizing metaphors, repetition, and personification. To truly capture the mental instability of the speaker, Edgar Allen Poe utilizes metaphors throughout the text to highlight points in the story that bring forth the mental illness of the speaker. The speaker states,
The most prevalent example of personification in the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" is the personification of the old man's "evil eye." Though the narrator not once describes the eye as possessing a human form or practicing humanlike actions, the narrator does view it as a separate being that is part of the old man himself. The narrator states, "it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye" (Edgar Allen Poe 981). This quote expresses that the narrator views the eye as possessing some form of sinister purpose, separate from the old man, whom the narrator himself claims to love and view as an innocent bystander to the eye's evil powers. The narrator elaborates further on the evil quality of the eye, comparing it to, "the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it" (Edgar Allen Poe 981). Clearly, the narrator views the eye as capable of such great evil and perhaps even believes that the eye itself intends to cause harm to the narrator – two separate actions that only humans themselves are capable of plotting to