The Tell-Tale Heart Mood

Words: 688
Pages: 3

Some say that after reading one of Edgar Allan Poe's famous poems, they thought that Poe had completely lost it. In “Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe uses 3 and more of the 12 elements of setting to create a dark tone in his story.The first element is time of day, the second is mood and atmosphere, and the third is man-made geography. There are 3 ways that Poe uses time of day.

In the story, Poe has 2 main characters. An OM (old man, pg 537, p2) and a MM (madman, beginning of story). Poe also states that it is midnight (pg 538, p2), the fact that it is night makes the story darker and nobody can see anything like a robber or murderer. The OM likes to keep his shutters inside his bedroom closed from fear of robbers (pg 538, p4), but that just means his room will be darker at night and harder to see in if someone was standing in the corner. To add to that, the MM has a lantern when he goes into
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After the MM manages to kill the OM, he cuts him up and stashes his body parts in the floorboards ( ), if the OM lived in the woods or in a house with tiles instead of floorboards, the MM would have had to put his body parts somewhere else and the police ( ) would have probably have found the OMs remains. Also the old man lives in a community full of houses, that means that when the OM screamed before he was murdered ( ), the sound was muffled by the house and the shutters being closed. If the old man had his shutters open or maybe no roof! The police could have identified his house faster and would probably have gotten there before the MM stored his remains in the floorboards. Finally, if the old man did not live in a community, nobody would have heard the scream because nobody would have been around and the MM would have gotten away with the murder. The OM had neighbors so one of them heard his scream and contacted the police leading to the arrest of the MM (