The narrative situation in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". An illustration of the captivating effect (eBook)

Essay from the year 2020 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Hamburg, language: English, abstract: This paper focuses on the captivating effect of the autodiegetic narration and which significant differences would occur throughout "The Tell-Tale Heart", if the narrator would be outside the diegesis, not a part of the story world (also called heterodiegetic narration).

Therefore, the beginning starts with a closer interpretation of the narrator’s character and their motives to plan the crime. Furthermore, the historical and literary context of The Tell-Tale Heart contributes to the argumentation. Followed by the context, the term paper includes a brief analysis of mad narrators in fiction. All arguments contain the information of several secondary sources. The conclusion provides an overview over the crucial arguments made in the main body of the paper and ultimately combines the interpretations in a final statement.

The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart is perhaps the most striking feature of the short story. Although the protagonist declares his sanity right in the beginning of the story, the reader before long learns about the evident mental illness of the narrator. After all, their insanity and madness result in the murder of the old man. It is the feeling of paranoia, surveillance and nervousness that ultimately leads to the crime. The protagonist, however, evidently cannot be trusted and appears more and more unreliable. So what is merely imagination and what is truly genuine in The Tell-Tale Heart?