Due date: Monday may 6th
Course code: ENG 1D1
Mrs. Warwick
Abigail Brandon
Tell Tale Heart
Like Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s other short stories Tell Tale Heart is a dark story. Poe uses visual imagery, auditory imagery, and setting to create an atmosphere of suspense and tension the short story Tell Tale Heart. The Author creates a dark night setting using visual imagery and he uses auditory imagery to give the reader a sense of what is happening in the narrators mind. Poe also uses setting to give the short story a dark scary atmosphere.
Visuals in Tell Tale Heart are immensely vivid and contribute a great amount to the dark atmosphere of suspense and tension. At the beginning of the story the narrator describes in great detail the old mans eye. The Narrator said, “ I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture --- a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” (p. 104 par. 2) This contributes to the atmosphere of suspense and tension because when the reader, reads that they can vividly picture the eye but do not know what is yet to come. The narrator also describes how he moves ever so quietly and how he observed the old man while he slept. The narrator said, “ And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it –- oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head.” That adds to a dark and scary atmosphere because of how well everything the narrator was doing was described, it makes it easy to visualize the dark room where the old man slept as well as everything the narrator was doing. The writer describes how the narrator moves, how slow he does each thing each night. The narrator said, “I moved it slowly --- very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the