The Tell Tale Heart Suspense
Say you are an old man. You live with an unpredictable teenager. You don’t know when your time will come but you know it's coming soon. Very soon. You assume the boy is crazy for a second and forget about it 5 minutes later. You shouldn’t think bad about people.
In the story, The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, Poe describes the fear and excitement of the characters to increase the level of suspense. The text states, “... and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out - “Who’s there”(Poe 91). This piece of evidence screams character anxiety. “He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself - “It is nothing but the wind in the chimney”(Poe 91). This old man is so scared that he is being delusional. He knows that there is someone or something in there making him lose it but he doesn’t know what it is. …show more content…
He uses a technique called vivid words. “Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror”(Poe 91). The narrator says that the “groan” was one of “mortal terror”. It wasn’t just any groan. the person who was groaning was mortally terrified of what was to come.“First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs”(Poe 93). If this isn’t vivid, I don’t know what is. He killed and cut the old man into pieces. Repetition was a key factor in writing the “The Tell Tale Heart”. The story says, “...for what had I to fear...for what had I to fear”(Poe 93). This raises the tension by getting the mind to think about whether or not he’ll get caught. The text also states, “...but he found it all in vain. All in vain” (Poe 91). Remember the first paragraph when the old man had been trying to calm himself with suppositions and couldn’t? This is what was racing through his mind when he was coming up with these
In the story, The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, Poe describes the fear and excitement of the characters to increase the level of suspense. The text states, “... and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out - “Who’s there”(Poe 91). This piece of evidence screams character anxiety. “He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself - “It is nothing but the wind in the chimney”(Poe 91). This old man is so scared that he is being delusional. He knows that there is someone or something in there making him lose it but he doesn’t know what it is. …show more content…
He uses a technique called vivid words. “Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror”(Poe 91). The narrator says that the “groan” was one of “mortal terror”. It wasn’t just any groan. the person who was groaning was mortally terrified of what was to come.“First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs”(Poe 93). If this isn’t vivid, I don’t know what is. He killed and cut the old man into pieces. Repetition was a key factor in writing the “The Tell Tale Heart”. The story says, “...for what had I to fear...for what had I to fear”(Poe 93). This raises the tension by getting the mind to think about whether or not he’ll get caught. The text also states, “...but he found it all in vain. All in vain” (Poe 91). Remember the first paragraph when the old man had been trying to calm himself with suppositions and couldn’t? This is what was racing through his mind when he was coming up with these