The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe and Eveline by James Joyce Essay

The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe and Eveline by James Joyce 'The Tell Tale Heart' and 'Eveline' are stories based around the circumstances, which surround a central character. Both protagonists are portrayed in totally different ways. The characters in both stories are quite different. Eveline is the image of a girl's failure to become a woman. She tells herself that "she would not be treated as her mother had been," but she isn't aware that "such treatment offers her the only kind of security she knows". She has had to endure violence at the hand of her father, and she has let herself believe that she is in love with Frank when she isn't really. In 'The Tell Tale Heart', the story contains a nameless narrator who is the central character of the story. The narrator may be male or female because Poe uses only "I" and "Me" in reference to this character. Most readers may assume that the narrator is male because it is written in first person by a male author but the story can also be plausible if the narrator was a woman. In the times Poe was writing, he would be creating a story whose impact would be changed simply by imagining this horrendous deed being committed by a woman. In 'The Tell Tale Heart', the story covers a period of eight days where any important action usually occurs around midnight. This period of time is relevant to the story as it makes the reader more curious about the narrator's ordeal. The readers are deliberately not informed about the illness that the narrator had, and they are left to wonder whether the 'evil eye' is truly evil. The eight day period limits what the reader knows because they don't know what happened before. The narrator may have an extremely genuine reason... ...to people of the early 1900's. 'Eveline' was also written in the early 1900's and in that time it would have been Eveline's duty to look after her father rather than be in love. So the time in which the story was written would have really affected the way in which the story was perceived, as people in the early 1900's were less tolerant of behaviour written in the stories. James Joyce's portrayal of Eveline is very believable because many of the readers may be able to relate to the character as she lives an ordinary life. The narrator in "The Tell Tale Heart", is not very believable because it is not often that readers hear about someone killing a person because they have a "vulture eye", it's just unrealistic, but the story has a pull to it that makes readers want to read it because it is exciting and there is suspense, something which "Eveline" lacks.