Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The Tell Tale Heart

I haven't read Edgar Allan Poe since probably middle school yet I remember it different from this reading. I remember it to be 'scary', and 'dark', and that he was probably the least favorite of my writers because of that. However reading this now, I enjoyed it. I love how his actually writing in itself makes the reader nervous; as if the exclamation points  and dashes were going to jump off the page and attack you. The way he narrated the story was perfect for the calculated insanity the character was supposed to possess. Especially the use of sensory descriptions like the creaking of the floor boards. "Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me", "So I opened it - you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily-until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye". I think when I first read Poe I couldn't appreciate how he used language as his partner in crime to create a murder. By the end of the reader I was nervous reading it.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree, even though I've read both of these stories several times, I still get antsy towards the endings. The intensity just builds so well, and you just know something dreadful and hilarious is waiting in the conclusion. Which one of the stories do you like better? I think The Tell-Tale Heart is my favorite of the two.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I definitely had different reactions the second time reading Poe's works. I feel that am better equipped to understand his language than I was in high school. His punctuation jumped out at me as well and made the reading experience more thrilling. Poe does a good job of putting the reader inside the mind of the killer. I feel like even though some people don't like Poe's darkness we can all agree that he is an expert in evoking an emotion from the reader.

    ReplyDelete