A short story made by Edgar Allan Poe entitled The tell-tale heart is under the genre of horror. According to Amir, S. (2017), this story describes the committing of murder and then confessing it due to being tormented by guilty and conscience. A story where the narrator itself believes that he is sane. He is the protagonist of the story who manifested a person who cannot be trusted to tell the real truth of what is happening. He thinks that his sureness in killing him means that he could not possibly be crazy. The narrator opens the man's door for seven nights, which would take him for a whole hour to wait. However, he always fails to see the old man's eyes because it is closed, making it difficult to do the deed. Luckily, on the eighth night, the old man wakes up, and the narrator's lantern flashes in the man's vulture eye. The old man screams, and the killer jumps onto the old man and gives him a heart attack. He suffocates him in the bed and chops his body up into little pieces, then hiding it under the floorboards. Neighbor phones the police and 3 officers come to check out the disturbance. Pleasant and courteous, the narrator is confident that they'll find no trace of murder. As soon as he hears the old man's thumping heart coming from under the floor, but it was really his own nervous heart thumping. He feels that the officers must hear the sound too, so then the man confesses to killing him and tells them to tear up the floorboards in order to reveal the body.
Austria, J. (2012) stated that the theme of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that human nature is a delicate balance of light and dark, or good and evil. Most of the time this precarious proportion is maintained; however, when there is a shift, for whatever reason, the dark or perverse side emerges. The context of this story let the readers think of how our actions can affect our own minds and as well as our perception of ourselves as a human being can influence the way we live life.
The structure of the story was presented in a narrative form and there are seven rhetorical devices that were applied many times within this story and these are amplification, apophasis, epithet, hyperbole, metaphor, parenthesis, and rhetorical question. In amplification, there are repeating word or expression which adds detail to emphasize the importance of the speaker's story like this one, “I talked more quickly –more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key, and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased.” these lines show how desperately the protagonist trying to convince his listener that he is not mad. Next is apophasis occurs throughout the entire story because the speaker is constantly trying to deny his madness to the point that he actually believes that he is not mad. Next is the epithet was illustrated in the story is when he describes his nervousness. He describes himself as being “dreadfully nervous.” Another one is hyperbole when the narrator describes the eye that he claims is the reason why he murdered the old man as being an “evil eye.” Here's an example of metaphor showed in the story, “He had the eye of a vulture– a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The speaker is saying that the false eye that the old man has is that of a vulture. Also, Poe uses parenthesis a lot within “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lastly, the presence of rhetorical questions where the speaker is asking a question that he expects no answer to because he thinks that he is providing the person, to whom he is confessing, a story, which will prove that he is not mad.
The perspective of the whole story helps develop the inherent ironies, as the reader understands the truth much differently from the madman. The dramatic monologue begins with the unnamed first-person narrator issuing a challenge of sorts: ‘‘True!—nervous, very, very dreadful nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’’ He declares at once that he suffers from a ‘‘disease,’’ but implies that because it has not dulled his senses, he cannot be called mad (eNotes, n.d.). Still, the narrator fails to convince his own character because the readers are forced to understand his rational for killing the man. In addition, the story is irony as what have stated in the second line, "The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them", only indicates ironic because he believed that his insanity was an asset to his situation when really it brought about his destruction. Had he not been so self-assured that his scheme would be flawless because of his "heightened senses", he invariably would not have ended up in confusion.
References
Amir, S. (2017), Analysis of the Short Story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe.
Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328162362_Analysis
_of_the_Short_Story_The_Tell-Tale_Heart_by_Edgar_Allan_Poe
Austria, J. (2012), Formalist Analysis SHORT STORY ANALYSIS TITLE: The Tell Tale Heart
THE TELL-TALE HEART. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/31746652/
Formalist_Analysis_SHORT_STORY_ANALYSIS_TITLE_The_Tell_Tale_Heart_THE_TELL
_TALE_HEART
eNotes, (n.d.), The Tell-Tale Heart. Retrieved from https://www.enotes.com/topics/tell-tale-
heart#:~:text=In%20Edgar%20Allan%20Poe's,alleges%20drove%20him%20to%20murder.
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