Comparing The Tell-Tale Heart By Nathaniel Hawthorne And Edgar Allen Poe
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Authors use many different techniques and styles to intrigue the readers of their stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe are very well known for their dark gothic appeal. The use of minute detail, overly-detailed description, throughout the stories help portray the idea even more by illuminating the specific and key details. The gothic period helped shape new forms and ways of writing and conveying certain topics and meanings through dark and sinister aspects, which is why authors find it a very useful device to help them complete their works as a whole. One technique Poe uses in, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, is his ability to create eerie situations with the characters in the story. Poe portrays this skill when he is describing the sneaking up on of the old man. “Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch’s minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers -- of my sagacity” (Poe). His description of how slow his hand moves creates the feeling of carefulness and tedious work in the man’s stalking, which adds the eeriness making full…show more content… Heidegger’s Experiment.” One way gothic elements are illustrated is when he refers to the dark setting in the story. “There, in fact, stood the four glasses, brimful of this wonderful water, the delicate spray of which, as it effervesced from the surface, resembled the tremulous glitter of diamonds. It was now so nearly sunset that the chamber had grown duskier than ever; but a mild and moonlike splendor gleamed from within the vase, and rested alike on the four guests and on the doctor's venerable figure” (Hawthorne). The minute detail of the vase is a very key section of the story, and he uses the dark and uncanny setting to illuminate that. Since the vase has a deeper and more symbolic meaning, the devices make that more clear and prominent to the