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Introduction

The Tell Tale Heart The Tell Tale Heart' is a story about a man who killed an old man just because he didn't like the way his eyes looked like. The main character speaks about madness as being a gift and not a kid of disability for example in paragraph one on page 93 he says: ' but why would you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them'. The mad man killed the old man and then cut him up and put him under the floorboards of the house. 'The fruit at the bottom of the bowl' is a story about a man (William Acton) who killed his neighbour (Huxley) because he thought that Huxley was having an affair with his wife. Acton strangles Huxley and then he cleans the Huxley's house so that there aren't any fingerprints in the house left so that the police can trace the murder back to Acton. In 'The Tell Tale Heart' the main character thinks that he has done the right thing by killing the old man and that he got rid of the 'evil eye'. ...read more.

Middle

The character sees the old mans eye as evil. This maybe is not unusual because the old man could be looking at the character in a strange way and by looking that way at him the character may think that the old man has an 'evil eye'. After he has murdered the old man and when he is sitting down in the room where the old man is dead under the floorboards chatting with the police he all of a sudden starts to hear a heartbeat which is getting louder, louder and louder. This heartbeat may represent the characters guilty conscience and shows us that the character is actually nervous about what he had done. However it's that mad people don't have a conscience so this may support the characters argument about not being mad, but on the other hand hearing a heartbeat that no one else can hear is a little bit strange and points that he might be mad. So the heartbeat is the key point in answering the question is he or is he not mad? In 'The Fruit at the bottom of the bowl' Acton can see himself as an artist who has just made a piece of art (the dead body) ...read more.

Conclusion

There also is a lot of dashes so that the sentence is made longer and in a way makes us the readers think that the character is mad. There is a lot of short and long sentences in the stories. The short sentences were mainly used they to create a bigger impact on the reader whereas the long sentences were boring and mostly describing things. The short sentences were used in 'The Tell Tale Heart' when the main character was feeling tense especially when he started to hear the heartbeat of the old man. I think that the portrayal of Edgar Allan Poe is better because his technique was better than the one of Ray Bradbury. I think that because he wrote in the 1st person narrative this is because I could engage better with the character and get into his inner thoughts whereas the 3rd person narrative which was used by Ray Bradbury doesn't give you that kind of insight into the character and the 1st person narrative helps us understand the characters madness. The other good thing that Edgar Allan Poe did was that he made the madness of the character grow more and more as the story went on. ...read more.

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our GCSE Edgar Allan Poe section.