Many authors use different literary elements throughout their stories to help create the meaning or theme of their work. By doing so, authors are able to use different mechanisms to bring everything together to form a theme. In "The Tell-Tale Heart,  Edgar Allan Poe uses many literary elements to ensure that his theme is prominent in his work. In this story, the theme of guilt is incorporated throughout the entire tale by using the literary elements of plot, character, and symbolism to prove that the guilt of the man's deeds was the cause to his madness.
Throughout this tale, Poe's plot is reinforced by using the events to slowly unravel the madman's true guilt buried in his heart, and the knowledge of his evilness haunts him until he cracks. At the climax of the story, the madman's guilt overwhelms him and causes him to cry out, "Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart! (Poe, pg. 760.) The madman's guilt had taken his mind captive and drove him to admit to the police officers what he had done. The nature of the madman's outburst and his agony over his committed murder proves that he was so overwhelmed with guilt that it drove him insane and caused him to reveal his crime, which also proves Poe's embedded theme of guilt.
Earlier in the story, the madman explains his faith in his deed by saying, "I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim. (Poe, pg. 762.) Right before the killer's guilt floods his mind; he has the audacity to think himself a genius for completing the murder stealthily. Poe sets up the plot in such a way that the reader thinks, up until the very end, that this man will get away with his murder; yet as his confidence becomes engulfs him, his guilt starts t...