TELL TALE HEART - A LITERARY CRITICISM

Tell Tale Heart is about a man with a killer instinct. He is bothered and irked by a man with a weird eye. This story is a typical Poe story due to the darkness and moral interwoven into the story. Poe's lessons in his tales were not obvious. They were thought provoking and often left you thinking about the story well after you finished it. The fact that the killer was bothered by the eye and then killed the beholder represents to me that Poe wanted to make clear how we look upon each other for not what's on the inside, but mostly the outside. After the murderer kills the old man, he buries him underneath the floorboards. This point of the story also represents Poe's rawness in his stories. He definitely does not sugar coat his thoughts. In the end people are looking for the murderer of the man and the man pleas his innocence.

Illustration for "The Black Cat" by Aubrey Beardsl...

1848 Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe at 39, a yea...

Edgar Allan Poe's house in the Bronx. Photo taken ...

After the fact, the killer goes mad at the sound of the old mans beating heart beneath the floor boards. He then goes to the authorities and confesses.

I liked this story as well as others of Poe because it keeps you on the edge of your seat. I also like the hidden themes interwoven in the story. After I read the book I wondered what would have happened if the man never confessed. Would he have gone mad and took his own life? I think Poe would never have answered the questions that people asked about the story.