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The Tell Tale Heart

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The Tell-Tale Heart
Q. Choose a novel or a short story in which the author creates a fascinating character. By referring to appropriate techniques, show how the author has created this character and why you found him/her so interesting.

Among the many strange and complex short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ has come to be known as one of the most mysterious and psychologically intriguing. The story contains a fascinating character in form of the narrator, which is explored through Poe’s use of word choice, irony, and alliteration, as well as many other thought provoking techniques. The story as a whole explores the themes of perception versus reality, and the question of whether the evil within is worse than the evil without, and Poe delves into these themes using the character he has created to narrate the story. The story follows the murder of an old man and its aftermath, the story told with what seems like dazzling clarity on behalf of the narrator, obscuring the meaning of the act and calling the emotional stability of the unnamed, assumed male, narrator into question.
In the very first sentence of the story, Poe introduces irony to draw in the reader, and leaves the beginning purposefully ambiguous to cause intrigue towards the narrator.
“TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
By starting the sentence with the word ‘true’, Poe leads us to believe what we read next will be some sort of confession, like the narrator was answering an unspoken question. However, the rest of the first line leaves us wary on whether or not to believe the narrator after he begins trying to convince us he is not mad. He repeats this point often throughout the story, actually leading the reader to believe that he is, in fact, mad. The reader begins to wonder whether or not what we are about to be

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