The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe embodies every core aspect that is needed in order for writing on a paper to be called a perfect short story. The five aspects needed are characters, point of view, a setting, a tone and style, and a theme. Each of those aspects is just as important individually as they are grouped together as a whole, with each having its own importance to the perfect story. These five aspects when thrown together by Edgar Allen Poe create one of the greatest and most well known short stories ever written.
A piece of writing can not be called a story unless it contains characters. The Tell Tale Heart contains four characters; the narrator, the old man, the police, and the neighbor that phoned that police. In Every story one of the characters is called the protagonist, in this story the protagonist was the narrator. The protagonist or narrator becomes the true focus of the tale. All of the characters in this story seem pretty straight forward with how they are described besides the narrator. The narrator was left un-described in this story. If one were to ask oneself weather the narrator was male or female they would be left without an answer. The narrator is this story could be either male or female because the author only uses terms like "me- and "I- when referencing the character. The characters in this story are very important in aiding the reader to understand what is happening and why.
The tone and style of this story also has great importance on how it was written. This story is really just a case of random violence that occurred because of a certain fear. That fear turned out to be the old man's eye. The narrator describes the eye as, "One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture "a pale blue eye, with a film over it."" That fear caused the narrator to commit the crime that he did and in many senses could be seen as the catalyst that caused the downfall of the narrator.
