The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe and Eveline by...

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 girls failure to become a woman. She tells herself that she would not be treated as her mother had been, but she isnt 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 isnt really. In The Tell Tale Heart, the story contains a nameless narrator who is†¦show more content†¦In Eveline, the story covers the whole of her life but is set in two different times. The reader knows she had suffered in her past and that she still suffers, so sympathises with her. If Eveline had been written in the same style of time like The Tell Tale Heart, where it would be set in a small period of time, then the reader may think Eveline is being selfish by leaving her old father, as the reader will not know about the torment she has received under her fathers hand. Tension is built in both stories in different ways. In The Tell Tale Heart, tension is felt in the first sentence. True!-Nervous-Very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am. The reader wants to know what the narrator is nervous about. Edgar Allen Poe has been very consistent with the use of structural devices to create a sense of dramatic exaggeration. A series of hyphens, question marks, exclamation marks and commas, all work well together to build pauses, momentary breaks and silences, which effectively lend to the dramatic tension at the opening of the story. Poe has also built tension with varied sentence structure. He uses long sentences to produce a great deal of momentum, while the short sentences quicken the pace of reading, at which the reader can understand and involve themselves in the plot. James Joyce writes the first paragraph of Eveline to be slow and calm. There isnt much action and we are unable to engage ourselves in the text