State of Being Sane and Insane -Stylistic Analysis of the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart “by using stylistic analysis to explore the narrator’s outward and inward world. Moreover, the analysis attempts to show the clash between the narrator’s state of being sane and insane . Since stylistic is considered as an important approach to explain the relation between language and its artistic function. The implicit and explicit state of the narrator’s behavior  is deeply shown during the analysis of by focusing on transitivity, revelation of material pursuit of him and the characters in the story which have created foreground the narrator’s psychological disease . The use of parallel structure and the transitivity of material process , mental process strengthen and highlight the narrator’s abnormal behavior and contradicted treatment of the old man and having  “vulture’s eye’’ as a base of the narrator’s obsession which made him moving stealthily many times during nearly the whole the story’s actions to get rid of his victim.