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The Telltale Heart

 

            A short story, "The Telltale Heart", was written by Edgar Allan Poe, a strange man with a deranged mind. The story was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843. In every person there is good and evil, and in this story the good in the narrator is pushed aside only to have the evil emerge. The narrator works for an old man and fear of the old man's eye consumes him, which leads to the murder of the old man by the narrator, who later confesses to his wrong doings. .
             The first sentence of the story creates suspense because the man is nervous and this makes the reader want to know what is causing his nervousness. Poe uses the technique of time as a way of showing the killer"s nervousness and as an attention grabber. He changes from a slow to a fast pace to show that the killer is calm in the beginning but gets nervous and confesses by the end of the story. The killer says, "It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening and I did this at midnight for seven long nights." By saying this, he shows how much precautions he takes when planning the murder. It also shows that he is very nervous and wants nothing to go wrong. That quote represents time going by slowly. After he commits the murder, the story gets to a faster pace. "I talked more quickly, more vehemently-but the noise steadily increased." The killer is talking to the police and growing more and more nervous by the second. This gets the reader's mind racing for wanting to know what will happen and if he will confess.
             Poe uses the technique of repetition to stress and exaggerate the fact that the killer is nervous. The killer says that he is "Nervous-very nervous, dreadfully nervous." This statement obviously shows that he is nervous. The feeling of guilt is overwhelming the killer because he starts to hear a ringing in his ears and says, "The ringing became more distinct. It continued and became more distinct.


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