The Tell Tale Heart Essay, Research Paper

In our mordern world, stories affect our life every day, but how do the authors

of these wonders keep the reader exited and focused? This is when the type of

writing called suspense comes along. Suspense is the type of writing skill

authors use to give readers uncertainty about the conclusion of the story. In

some stories, the reader may guess the conclusion before they even finish

reading the introduction, but when authors add suspense in to their master

pieces, the stories become far more interesting and keeps the reader wondering

whether if the conclusion of the story would end like they thought it would, and

therefore keeps the reader wanting to read more. The famous writer Edgar Allan

Poe is an expert in writing suspense related stories and professionally uses

this particular writing style. “The Tell Tale Heart” is just one of Poe’s many

masterpieces that possesses the ability to keep the reader of the story reading

from the beginning of the story to the end. But what exactly is suspense and how

does Edgar Allan Poe use it to manipulate his readers? He used three very

powerful tools, foreshadowing, hampering information, and character development.

And this is exactly how he applied the three skills in to his story.

The author first led suspense in to his story right at the beginning. He

practically started the story by using foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is a very

interesting type of literary device. It gives out clues to the reader about the

conclusion of the story. Usually it is the character of the story that gives out

the clues but from time to time it may vary. Because foreshadowing usually comes

in at the very beginning, you may not believe what the character tells you

because you do not exactly know what kind of person he is, and if the character

is some psychopath, obviously you are not going to believe him. Putting

foreshadowing in the beginning of a story is an excellent way to start a story

because that way it keeps the reader’s attention at the beginning of the story.

During the story, Edgar Allan Poe gave the reader much information and

description, but you could tell that he also held back much information. For

example, at the beginning of the story, the man told the reader that he loved

the old man but hates the eye and believes the eye is evil. Normally the reader

would think that all he want to do is to take out the old man’s eye, but who

would have ever knew that he was going to kill the old man, for the man never

wronged him or given him an insult. Yet he would kill the old man just so he

would not get stared by a fake eye. Also towards the end of the story of the

“Tell Tale Heart”, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “The officers were satisfied. My

MANNER had convinced them.” Yet at the very end of the story, he wrote the

complete opposite of what he wrote earlier, “They heard! – They suspected! -They

Knew!” As you can see, the author created suspense from another perspective.

In the story “The Tell Tale Heart”, Edgar Allan Poe used character development

to enforce the suspense in his story. As the story unfolds, the main character

turns out to be a psychopath who doesn’t know what he is talking about. Any

reader would know that he is not normal and think he would snap out of it any

second. The first time one read the story one would think that he would stop mid

way trying to kill the old man and reason with his conscious and eventually get

a hold of himself. Because of the crazy character, readers may not exactly

believe what the he say, and eventually questions his/her self about the

foreshadowing.

By now you should have a pretty good idea of how Edgar Allan Poe uses suspense

so well in “The Tell Tale Heart”, and should be able to realize just how well he

hid it among all the details. This is how Poe `magically’ drew the reader’s

attention without even letting them know. He started out by foreshadowing his

story to the readers and let them guess the ending, then slowly plays around

with the reader by taking out some details from his story to let the reader

guess even more. And finally let them wonder all over again about every thing by

letting the reader know the story revolves around an untrustworthy psychopath.

As you can see, “The Tell Tale Heart” truly is a work of wonder, but the real

question is how exactly does Poe come up with such an excellent writing style?

Well, it is still a mystery to many and shall always be.