Literary Analysis of The Tell-Tale Heart Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Literary Analysis of The Tell-Tale Heart - Essay Example This paper aims to analyze this marvellous and excellently written short story by discussing the characters, themes, symbols, textual details and imagery. The Tell Tale Heart may be categorized as a horror short story. The story is written in a first-person narrative style. The story opens with the explanation of horrified feelings and terror. These feelings if observed more closely are the remembrance of those terrifying events and things from the past (Quinn 1998, p. 394). The tell tale heart, is a story narrated by a mentally unstable and over suspicious man. It determines the mental conflicts within the narrator's mind but eventually ends up in murdering his innocent housemate, a pale blue eyed old man. Yet he claims his sanity and stability of mind and tries to bring logic in his cruel act. He kept on insisting about not being crazy and talks about his cold blooded and vicious planning of murder (Bloom 2002, pp. 70-71). He does try to satisfy himself by admitting killing the old man due to fear of his pale blue coloured eyes but he could not get rid of the guilt of his actions due to which he kept hearing old man's loud heart thumping sound and blows his own cover in front of the officers by confessing his crime. The narrator of The Tell Tale Heart seems and convincingly was a mentally unstable person who was dangerous and lost his control in his life, his obsession led to his destruction eventually. He felt hostile about his identity and wanted to stay anonymous. From the beginning he tried to protect his view about life as correct and his over imaginative and suspicious nature as peculiar sensitivity of sensing danger around. The narrator of â€Å"The tell tale heart† is a killer of an innocent man. The narrator of the story seemed well planned and gave acute time to his course in action, leaving no choice for the victim at all. The Tell Tale heart’s narrator waited for 7 nights and murdered the already scared man randomly on the 8th night. The factor of fear is even involved here; he could not stand the fear of his pale blue eyes. The tell tale heart’s narrator was a confused mind person who refused to be insane but did admit the fact that his actions were of a right cause and planned until he chopped the body and hid it under the floorboards. Due to his heighten sensitivity of listening to different sounds, he was unable to distinguish between the real and imaginative sounds so he confessed his crime and but did call the police officers villain as he could not distinguish between his own actions which were vicious. The Tell Tale Heart is the story which describes the feelings of conflict within a person. The use of unambiguous sentence structures and incompleteness of the narrations the author clearly illustrates the conflicts that are prevalent in the narrator’s mind. The unstable mental condition of the narrator is also obvious from the choice of words, unstructured sentences and improper expressing ways by the narrator. The story is tense and the narrator keeps this tension increasing gradually throughout the story until the end when the narrator accepts his sin of killing an innocent person. The story portrays violent act of murdering someone due to the inner obsession with the old man’s eyes. The insanity of the narrator is exposed through the extreme reaction of that obsession in killing him. The narrator does not have control over his actions and reactions which is also a predictor of an