How an Author's Style Choices When Writing Can Develop a Central Idea

How an Author’s Style Choices when Writing can Develop a Central Idea

The short story “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe and the poem “I felt a funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson both have a central idea of insanity or madness developing within the main characters. The authors, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, both advance the common central idea through punctuation, pacing, and metaphors or figurative language. The nameless narrators in both texts describe how their mental states are deteriorating. Along with the characters, or narrators, being deranged, the authors of both texts include elements like figurative language, syntax, and time manipulation to create an overall eerie and mysterious tone of the reading.

In the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson and the short story “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe the authors both show the common central idea between them through the use of metaphors, otherwise known as figurative language. In “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrator is caught up with and obsessed with an old man eye. The narrator of “The Tell Tale Heart” in paragraph two that the old man “...[has] the eye of a Vulture….” The narrator goes onto say in the same paragraph, “Whenever it [the eye] fell upon me, my blood ran cold.” This could possibly mean that the “eye” that the Narrator is so obsessed with may not be just only an eye, this may be a metaphor for the Narrator's outlook on the world that he symbolizes by an eye. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s story, Emily Dickinson’s poem also uses figurative language such as the metaphor. In Dickinson’s poem, the narrator describes in the very first stanza how the narrator in Dickinson’s poem feels about or sees the world in a negative light, this most likely contributes to the main idea of mental insanity. Overall, both texts include a metaphor providing support to the common central idea between the two of them that is madness, or losing sanity.

The texts “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and “The Tell Tale Heart” both share a common key idea of madness or lunacy. Both readings also share that they show this central idea through punctuation. “Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!” shrieked the Narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Tell Tale Heart” in paragraph 17. In this quote specifically, Poe uses so much punctuation or syntax to show the reader that the Narrator truly was overreacting to the situation at hand. This gives the reader clues that the something is definitely mentally off about the Narrator. In Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, the Narrator uses dashes at the end of and intertwined into lines to