Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe uses many things to create suspense in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. He has an insane person tell the story, so it is from the criminal’s point of view instead of the police or investigators. The insane man even explains how he wants to kill an old man and what he does to get ready to kill him. When he finally kills the man, he mutilates the man’s body by cutting it up and putting all of the severed body parts under the floorboards. “First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs. I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber and deposited all between the scantlings…”(pg.206)

Poe also uses time to create suspense in the story. He sometimes makes time go slower to emphasize how slow and carefully the insane man is doing something like when the man saw him and he did not move for a long time “I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle…” (pg.204). He also sometimes makes time go faster to emphasize how fast the insane man is doing or thinking about something.

Poe repeats words and uses evil and dark words in the story to scare the reader and to create more suspense. For example, one of the times Poe repeated words was when the insane man thought he could hear the old man’s heart beating. The insane man says, “…the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker and louder and louder every instant.”(pg. 205) In the story, Poe uses dark words to describe the intensity of the insane man’s crime and to show how crazy the man was.

Poe gets the reader involved in the story to create more suspense, too. He has the reader involved in the story by writing quotes directly to the reader to explain some of the things in the story to the reader so they don’t have to figure out what he is talking about. In the story, the exact opposite thing happens in the end because the insane man confesses to his crime, which was unexpected because he had planned it so carefully and Poe did this to have the reader thinking about what would happen in the end of the story even though something totally different was going to happen.