The literary device personification is when a writer gives typically human characteristics to non-human animals or objects. For example, describing a "furious thunderstorm" would be personification, because the phrase suggests that the thunderstorm has human emotions and can feel fury.
Abstract ideas are often personified as well. For example, the concept of death or dying is often seen in literature as a human figure in a long, black, hooded cloak, carrying a scythe.
The...
The literary device personification is when a writer gives typically human characteristics to non-human animals or objects. For example, describing a "furious thunderstorm" would be personification, because the phrase suggests that the thunderstorm has human emotions and can feel fury.
Abstract ideas are often personified as well. For example, the concept of death or dying is often seen in literature as a human figure in a long, black, hooded cloak, carrying a scythe.
The most important example of personification in the short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" is the personification of the old man's "evil eye." Though the narrator never describes the eye as having a human form or doing human things, he does see it as a separate being from the old man himself. The narrator says,
"it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye" (paragraph 5).
This quote shows that the narrator sees the eye as having some kind of sinister purpose, separate from the old man, whom the narrator claims to love and sees as an innocent bystander to the eye's evil.
The narrator elaborates further on the evil quality of the eye, comparing it to,
"the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it" (paragraph 3).
Clearly, the narrator sees the eye as capable of great evil and perhaps even thinks it intends to harm him - two things that only humans are capable of plotting to do.
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