Journal Entry 71: Hints and Foreshadowing

“The Tell-Tale Heart” has a strong sense of dramatic irony: the narrator keeps claiming to be sane, but the reader become increasingly certain that he is insane. What details give you clues or hints that he is insane? How does the opening paragraph foreshadow the events that will happen later in the story? Can you describe the overall feeling or mood of the story?

We can tell that the narrator is crazy because he keeps on talking to himself. He also wants to kill someone just because he thought that person's eye is like a vulture's and makes his blood cold. He also ENJOYS cutting off hands and legs of a corpse, and laughs when he talks about how he's so smart that he dumped the old man's blood into a tub. The opening paragraph foreshadows the events that happens later on in the story by showing us how mad the narrator really is. The narrator also talks about how he can hear things from heaven and hell, which foreshadows that his "hearing abilities" might make him go even madder. He also talks about how nervous he was, and since we know he is pretty much the craziest guy I've ever heard of, he is probably planning to do something so horrible that even a mad man can be nervous about. The overall feeling or mood of the story is probably just creepy and disgusting (the killing part and bloody things). I just basically makes me want to first scream and then puke. This story is also very suspenseful, and keeps the readers on edge. So, even though this story disgusts and scares me, it's interesting enough to keep me entertained and reading.