Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart (Book Review Sample)

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The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is an amazing American prolific author, critic, editor, and poet who is remarkably known for his marvelous work on poems and evocative short stories. His work captures the full attention and interests readers through imagery. His short story "The Tell Tale Heart" is amazingly written to give out the real picture of events as they occur. One could create the picture of every event through imagery, applying the five senses as he cautiously applies suitable authorial choice on the story setting to elaborate and enhance further understanding of his work.
The prolific author uses imagery to demonstrate the obsession of the homicidal criminal, which created self-hatred, deformity, and overwhelming guilt after the murder of the old man. Poe uses imagery to describe an eye rather than two to indicate that the narrator is selfish and only cares about him and the awaiting intention (Hudgins). This happens when the narrator begins by talking about his madness and then views and describes the old man's eye as "pale, blue eye with a film over it." By always mentioning the old man's "eye," the narrator refers to a homonym "I" to illustrate his determination to destroy the old man's self. He accomplishes his mission but later on succumbs to ill intention when he fails to contain his guilt about the murder activity he just performed before the policemen whom he viewed as normal, chatting and smiling when he could not do the same. He finally screams and accepts that he was truly responsible for the murder of the man (Marchini).
Moreover, Poe describes the old man's groan as the same as that of the narrator, thus giving a vivid picture of the terrifying groan that the narrator had experienced earlier on at night. It also illustrates that the time had come when the old man had sensed danger in his life, and it was right if he ended it. Since the narrator had experienced such terror grown at night, he understood the pain in the old man's heart as he feared for his life. He went and pulled the man to the floor, then pulled the heavy bed him to suffocate him to death. Finally, after killing the old man and coincidentally, the policemen come in to check on the emergency that they have been alerted about. The narrator gains confidence and plays around with their minds as he takes them around to inspect the house. The imagery comes in when he hears a sound which he describes as "it was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when it is enveloped in cotton." The most horrible imagery is when the heart sound continues even after killing the old man. He gets terrified as the sound seems to be too loud in the mind of the narrator (Marchini). Poe enables the readers to imagine this sound as if it was there with them as the sound intensifies in the killer's head and even beyond the house. The main idea of Poe using the image is to make the story relatable, memorable, and intense for the reader.
Poe applies the hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste sense in his tell-tale heart work to enhance the understanding through the imagination of the events happening in the story as he creates layers of the environment's dialed description. The strongly applied sense in the story is the sense of hearing (Robinson). Through the narrator's sense of hearing, he can hear everything all over, including on earth or in heaven but most importantly "hell." He also thinks that the old man's laying his "vulture" eye on him triggered his main intention of planning to get rid of him so that he can no longer get furious and irritated. He describes the eyes as pale blue covered by a film over them.
Additionally, he is only terrified about an eye and says, "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold..." he, therefore, determines himself to murder the old man for having an irritating eye. Secondly, Poe uses the sense of sound as the mad man hallucinates and justifies himself for not being mad at the beginning of the story. Sound sense enables the readers to stay in touch with the story as they find out more about the narrator's plans. He finally screams to confess to the police his murderous act and confirms if he is truly mentally unstable (Robinson). After killing the old man, he uses the sense of touch to confirm if his heart bits were no more after silencing them. He also demonstrates the touch sense by describing how he used to describe how he would quietly try to sneak into the old man's room "k