The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

Essay by crosscravingsHigh School, 11th grade May 2004

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'The Tell Tale Heart' is a story about a man who killed an old man just because he didn't like the way his eyes looked like. The main character speaks about madness as being a gift and not a kid of disability for example in paragraph one on page 93 he says: ' but why would you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them'. The mad man killed the old man and then cut him up and put him under the floorboards of the house.

'The fruit at the bottom of the bowl' is a story about a man (William Acton) who killed his neighbour (Huxley) because he thought that Huxley was having an affair with his wife. Acton strangles Huxley and then he cleans the Huxley's house so that there aren't any fingerprints in the house left so that the police can trace the murder back to Acton.

In 'The Tell Tale Heart' the main character thinks that he has done the right thing by killing the old man and that he got rid of the 'evil eye'. The main character is very confident about what he has done and think that he had a very good reason for killing the old man which was that he didn't like the way his eyes looked like and because he thought that the eyes were evil. We can see evidence of that in the 2nd paragraph on page 93 where he says: 'I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture-very gradually- I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.' In my opinion I think that...