Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and the Symbolism of the Eye

In “The Tell Tale Heart” Edgar Allan Poe builds up suspense by guiding us through the darkness that dwells inside his character’s heart and mind. Poe masterfully demonstrates the theme of guilt and its relationship to the narrator’s madness. In this classic gothic tale, guilt is not simply present in the insistently beating heart. It insinuates itself earlier in the story through the old man’s eye and slowly takes over the theme without remorse. Through his writing, Poe directly attributes the narrator’s guilt to his inability to admit his illness and offers his obsession with imaginary events - The eye’s ability to see inside his soul and the sound of a beating heart- as plausible causes for the madness that plagues him.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a short story about internal conflict and obsession, showcases the tortured soul due to a guilty conscience. The story opens with an unnamed narrator describing a man deranged and plagued with a guilty conscience for a murderous act. This man, the narrator, suffers from paranoia, and the reason for his crime is solely in his disturbed mind. He becomes fixated on the victim’s (the old man’s) eye, and his conscience forces him to demonize the eye. Finally, the reader is taken on a journey through the planning and execution of a murder at the hands of the narrator.

This mistaken fantasy fuels the narrator’s madness, giving him more evidence that mu... ... middle of paper ... ...d the rational explanation is that the narrator wanted to kill the old man for his own indulgence. The liberation the narrator describes after the murder of the old man shows that violence was truly the key motive for his crime. Throughout both stories Poe shows that both narrators in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell Tale Hart” long for violence. He does not give clear motives for their crime; instead he leaves the detective work to the readers. After careful analysis of both stories, the reader understands that the narrators’ psychotic perceptions of reality, their domestic lifestyles, and their craving for violence, is the only reason these men commit such heinous acts without reason.

He is known for his wonderfully twisted tales involving such characters as an unstable brother with a mysterious ailment (The Fall of the House of Usher,) a methodical murderer (The Tell-Tale Heart,) and an enraged, revenge seeking, homicidal maniac (The Cask of Amontillado.) Through analysis and citations of the tales listed above, in conjunction with the opinions of literary critics, the reader will clearly see the oft repeated theme of madness and insanity hard at work. Madness seems to inject itself into Poe’s tale, The Fall of the House of Usher, from the very beginning. The narrator of this tale begins by using extremely detailed comparisons and descriptions of the home of Roderick Usher, to relay the “insufferable gloom” and “utter depression of soul” (654) he feels when he first sees the place. He describes the outside, with its “vacant eye-like windows,” and “white trunks of decaying trees” (654).

The narrator, Montresor wants to not only get away with killing his rival, but he wants to do so in a way that prevents the man from knowing of the narrator’s cruel ... ... middle of paper ... ...the points mentioned if one was to go back to the question is there a deeper, darker meaning to Poe’s fiction “The Cask of Amontillado”? It would be hard to argue no when the very characters in the story are walking, talking personifications of these characteristics. These people represent the worst in humanity, engaging in murder, betrayal, and many other heinous things. In fact, one could even suggest that Poe seeing these things in everyday society is what inspired him to write this tale. Maybe a wrong was done to him that went unjust, and this story is just his fantasy of getting revenge on that person.

The Evil “I”: Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart What could possibly motivate someone to kill an innocent old man in his sleep? Edgar Allan Poe proposes an answer to that question in the short story entitled “The Tell-Tale Heart”, where an insane narrator, who is convinced to be perfectly rational, murders an old man because of the unrest he feels at the sight of his vulture-like eye. Although the narrator views the eye as an evil presence, he fails to see that the eye symbolizes himself, the true evil power in the story. To begin, the narrator is haunted by the idea that the eye is evil and that he must dispose of it. At the start, it is clear that the eye disturbs the narrator: “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe 413).

His repeated insistence on postponing his highly confusing task emphasizes his uncertainty and kindles our own. Emotionally, Hamlet 's procrastination produces in him a growing rage that leads to his killing of Polonius in a fit of madness, an act that provokes Claudius to set in motion the incidents that lead to Hamlet 's exile and his escape from the Claudius’s execution plot. This awakens Hamlet from the captivation that he has with his own personal tragedy and prepares him to find the “divinity that shapes our

Tension is a commonly used tool to hook and grasp the readers’ attention, by using conflict to raise the emotional intensity to a maximum. Edgar Allen Poe’s display of tension can be identified in two of his gothic fiction works, The Tell Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado. Both stories are confessions of a murder told in first person. The Tell Tale Heart is regarding a man killing an old man simply because of a vulgar eye, without any intimate passion. However, The Cask of Amontillado describes the protagonist’s grudge that leads to carrying out revenge without impunity.

It becomes an aggressive fixation and in some cases they may even lose themselves or their own sanity in the process. This idea that obsession leads to insanity is furthermore explored in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” in which the narrator becomes so enthralled with the eye of his old neighbor, that when he kills his neighbor in attempts to get rid of the eye, he cannot keep himself together and reveals to the authorities his secret, which in turn can be assumed to result in the narrator’s own death. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” Poe uses great symbolism and a distinct style to reveal that obsession ultimately leads to insanity. One major way that Poe gets the theme across is by using substantial amounts of symbolism all throughout the story. Poe lets the narrator reveal his unexplainable fixation over his neighbor’s eye by admitting, “I loved the old man.

Do we truly ever know if one is mad? Madness is the driving force that tears away at our souls and makes us assess our deepest nightmares. It is the fears and terrors that will tip us over the edge of this imaginative level of insanity. Edgar Allen Poe often wrote many murderous and gruesome stories that would influence the reader to contemplate the bigger ideas in life. “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by Poe in 1843, is one of the most well known short stories from his time that explores the hidden qualities of an unknown narrator who attempts to convince the readers of his saneness.