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The Tell-Tale Heart

Decent Essays

Edgar Allen Poe strives to achieve a single, unified effect in each of his short stories. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe works to highlight the effect of the narrator’s madness on the reader’s perception both of the narrator and the events of the story. Using first person point of view, elevated language, awkward sentence structure, and other literary techniques, Poe keeps the reader focused on the obvious madness and subsequent untrustworthy nature of the narrator, providing a unique and chilling perspective into the murder of the old man. The narrator of the story most likely suffers from schizophrenia, a mental illness characterized by abnormal social interactions and difficulty differentiating fantasy from reality. The depth and intensity

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