Tell-Tale Heart

The Reflection of the Soul in Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart"

Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" appeared a decade after Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" in Russia and twenty years before Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, whose protagonist essentially become the archetypal anti-hero of modern literature. Between the American and the Russian is the whole continent of Europe, and it stands to reason that while on both sides of the continent literary characters were "going mad," something on the continent must have been happening to promote this change. This paper will analyze Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" and show how it reflects (through character, symbol, and irony) the mania of the Romantic/Enlightenment Age in which it was rooted.

Poe's own life is as full of melancholy and darkness as his many tales and poems. Born in Boston, Poe's life kept mainly to the Eastern Coast (he died in Baltimore). His mother died when...
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