A literary analysis on "The Tell Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

Literary Analysis of “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

Sungwon Kim

             The short story, “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe contains horror, a key element of American gothic literature. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, gothic fiction is “a mode of narrative fiction dealing with supernatural or horrifying events and generally possessed of a claustrophobic air of oppression or evil. (Birch, Dinah. "Gothic fiction.”) The horror aroused from the narrator’s story of killing makes it a classic work of gothic fiction. The narrator reveals his evilness as he describes his psychological process in the murder. The background of night and darkness, description of sight and sound, and fear felt by the victim himself adds intensity to the feeling of horror to readers.

The story is about a brutal murder. The narrator describes how he killed an old man. He went to the old man’s room in a sneaky manner every night. While the old man was sleeping, he just watched him lying down on a bed. He does this for seven nights, and he feels excited. This scene of mental insanity arouses fear in minds of readers. However, the narrator say that he is not mad and that he did not kill the old man out of feelings of hatred, revenge or greed. On the contrary, he tells the reader that he felt love toward the man, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.” What drove him to commit murder was the old man’s eye which caused him to feel anxious and even furious. He calls it, “the eye of a vulture.” Killing an old man because his eyes is a sign of psychological madness. As the reader is told the narrator’s thought in detail, the mad man’s psychopathic personality disorder contributes to a feeling of horror. For instance, when he kills the man, the narrator says, “I then smiled gaily.” He is also proud when he hides the body under the floor. The biggest shock to readers that creates the most intense horror is what he does to the body of the old man after the murder. The narrator says, “I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.” He then hides pieces of the body under the floor. In addition to the horror felt by the madness of the narrator, this brutal act clearly marks this story as gothic.

             Poe’s emphasis on the setting of the story also creates a mood of suspense and horror. The whole atmosphere during the story is darkness, and this darkness attributes to making readers to be unaware of what will happen next. It induces the readers to feel nervous and tense. For example, at night when the murderer watches upon the old man while asleep, there is suspense because it is uncertain what the insane man will do. He creeps at night holding a dark lantern. In addition, Poe uses little sounds in silence and dark that add suspense, such as “wind in the chimney,” “the mouse crossing the floor,” “the hinges creaked.” The mad man also hears the beating of the old man’s heart which is caused by the victim’s own fear and the narrator’s madness. He hears heartbeat even when the old man is dead.

             Readers are directly told about the horror felt by the old man before he is killed. Ever since the old man hears a slight noise caused by tin fastening, he stays awake. The mad man describes, “His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not.” He also writes, “Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.” Therefore, it is easy to imagine how scared the old man was.

            “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic fiction of horror and suspense. The narrator is a psychopath, and the process of the violent murder and the fear of the victim directly create horror in the reader. Other indirect elements such as the darkness of the night and the suspenseful sounds in the writing make the horror more intense. 

Work Cited

Birch, Dinah. "Gothic fiction." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 9 Mar. 2013 

                         

                               

     

Anaphora the rhetoric device

Anaphora

Sungwon Kim

Anaphora (rhetoric)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In rhetoric, an Anaphora (Greek: ἀναφορά, "carrying back") is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis.^[1] In contrast, an epistrophe (or epiphora) is repeating words at the clauses' ends.

Three examples:

1.      From “I have a dream” , obviously “I have a dream” and for other phrases starting with “Now is the time”, “one hundred years later”  

2.      One author well known for his use of anaphora is Charles Dickens (seen in quotation below).

 The second one is a literature use from a novel “A Tale of Two cities” by Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

3.       This something I made up,

I am stupid

I am ugly

I am a crippled

I am the most useless man in the world but

                 Not as you are except Mr. Tame

A Literary Analysis on "Why I write" by George Orwell

Name: Sungwon Kim (John)

ID number: 131029

Class: 10V3

Date: 05/03/2013

How does the use of genre and writing style support the main ideas on George Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’

In “Why I Write”, George Orwell explains his development as a writer and points out four factors that motivate his writing, which are “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.” Throughout the essay, he discusses different genres and writing styles to show his life as a writer from beginning to his future direction. Chiefly, it is a personal narrative essay of his life, and at the same time, it is an expository essay that it generally explains about four motives of every writer.

Many genres used in the essay account for his four motives. As a personal narrative, it uses descriptive language to elaborate on his life from childhood. When he was young, Orwell explains that he was lonely and usually spent time alone making up stories and had conversations through his imagination. Here, his autobiography describes his feelings, his thinking, and the influences he had. Also he writes, “I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.” This thinking led to his another motive, sheer egoism which continued as a professional writer. For him, being a writer seemed clever and to be known by other people by his writing was the way to live a different life from his adolescence which he sees as having many failures. Using this background information, Orwell wants the readers to fully understand how his motives developed over time from personal to political.

The biography continues in his story of adolescence, and then he practiced the literary exercise of writing a diary, but this writing became less about himself and more about what he saw. His writing style is still descriptive as seen here, “where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot.” Later in the essay, this developed into what he calls historical impulse, “desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts.”

Another genre that can be seen in the essay is poetry. When he was sixteen, he developed motivation of aesthetic enthusiasm through the genre of poetry. He quotes the lines from Paradise Lost,  “So hee with difficulty and labour hard Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.” To Orwell, the use of repetitive letters and words and the way they produce their sounds make a beautiful piece of writing which results him aesthetic enthusiasm. He writes, “Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose of the rhythm of a good story.” By adding poems, he creates change in the rhythm of this essay. Also, his own poem that shows his conflicting attitude towards opposing totalitarianism contributes to clarifying another of his motives, political purpose.

             Towards the end, his writing style is relatively simple and straightforward. His everyday language helps readers to understand easily so that many people can relate to his political opinions, not only relating to politics, but his writing. He also uses metaphor like here, “Writing a book is like a long bout of some painful illness” to emphasize that writing does not only satisfy a writer’s purposes but accompanies several hardships. He also uses simile shown in “Good prose is like a windowpane” which means good prose is the one that readers can see through and understand clearly. Also the poem he wrote, ‘A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been’, has end rhymes and equal four lines which enhance the aesthetic quality. The words that form end rhymes are ‘haven’ with ‘shaven’, ‘please’ with ‘trees’, ‘dissemble’ with ‘tremble’ and every stanza has two or more rhyming words. Lastly, he explains, “Purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.’ It is interesting that there are many sounds used repetitively in this sentence such as several Ps, Ss, and Ws, which contributes to producing rhyme sounds, which make the sentence itself like a purple passage.           

With the support of various genres and writing styles, he tried to answer to the question, “Why I write” by explaining his motivations of writing. Although the first three motives would outweigh the fourth for him throughout his development, he saw the injustice underlying in society through his adult experiences and started to convey his political view. In conclusion, his writing is personal, aesthetic, historical, and political and as a writer he tried to balance each.

Word Count: 751

Monthly TOEFL Essay #2 - Bottled air in the 21st century ?

             When companies started bottling water, many people thought it was absurd to pay money to buy such a common public resource. However, as earth’s waters became polluted by various human activities, people started to buy purified water, and now every market sells bottled water. In the twenty-first century, there is another valuable resource that is becoming more and more polluted: air. It is not too difficult to imagine purified air being bottled and sold in stores.

             Many people were unaware about the dangers of water pollution until tap water became undrinkable in certain parts of the world. With the high rate of pollution, air may finally become dangerous to breathe in industrializing countries. One of these countries is China which is facing serious problems because of air pollution. China has made tremendous progress in economic development, but a great deal of harmful emissions from countless manufacturing industries has made areas within China desolate. This phenomenon is often referred to desertification and deforestation which indicate that the air in China has lost its ability to self-purify.

As a result, China’s air quality has become extremely poor that some first-time visitors to China report to have felt uncomfortable when breathing. Thus, the sale of purified air may first occur in China and other cities in many countries may follow. People who are very concerned about their well-being might begin to purchase such bottled air for preventing respiratory illness, and later it may be a part of modern life, much like drinking bottled water. If changes are not made, in a few decades, humans may no longer be able to breathe freely.

             Some people may laugh about this because they think it will never happen. Nevertheless, no one can know the future for sure, but what may feel like sudden changes may have been the result of a lack of awareness and action. With desertification and deforestation spreading on Earth, we must act before it is too late when air may become another item on a grocery list.