In Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" we question the sanity of the narrator almost immediately, but we cannot prove either way whether or not he is insane. I have read a lot of Poe's work although not all of it. His mysterious style of writing greatly appeals to me. Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and the hysteria lurking beneath our carefully structured lives. I believe, for the most part, that this is done through his use of setting and his narrative style. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the setting was used to portray a dark and gloomy picture of an old house lit only with lantern light with a possible madman lurking inside. I think this was done immediately and deliberately so that the reader could make an instant connection between darkness and impending doom. "His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness." Poe is able to sustain an atmosphere, which is chillingly dark and sinister. This is one of the tricks that are largely derived from the tradition of the Gothic tale. The entire setting in the story provides us with the feeling of melancholy and sense of impending doom, death, or disaster.The way that Poe's work is narrated is also an element in Poe's short story style that appears in a similar manner throughout his stories. He has a type of creativity, which lets the reader see into the mind of the narrator or main character of the story. In the case of The Tell-Tale Heart the narrator and main character are one and the same. Many of the characters in Poe's stories seem to be insane. The narrator often seems to have some type of psychological problems. In The Tell-Tale Heart the story opens with the narrator saying; "True-Nervous-Very, Very Dreadfully Nervous I had been and am! but why will you say that I am mad?" Yet the irony is, had not the narrator immediately assumed that he had to defend himself against us thinking that he is mad, that in itself promoted the very idea to the reader...
