The tell tale edgar allan poe

He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not.

His fears had been ever since growing upon him. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. For before he had murdered the old man, the narrator had imagined his victim ‘trying to comfort himself’ when he heard a noise outside his bedroom: Both texts centre on the murder of an ‘old man’ in both cases, the murderer is driven to feel guilt over his crime by being ‘haunted’ by his victim from beyond the grave (Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, the old man’s beating heart in Poe’s story) both Macbeth and Poe’s narrator show signs of being at least a little mentally unstable in both texts, the murder of the victim is followed by a knocking at the door.īut what makes Poe’s tale especially effective is the way he employs doubling to suggest that it is perfectly natural that the narrator should be paranoid about the sound coming from the floorboards.