Insanity is a repetitious theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s work, having fun taunting and teasing his readers with dark subjects. Poe’s writing contains topics that make people feel uncomfortable; his characters have inconsistencies that leave readers scratching their heads. Poe creates two prime examples of inconsistent characters including the unnamed narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart,” and Roderick Usher from “The Fall of the House of Usher.” These two stories have frequent similarities concerning the topic of madness. The symbol of an eye, diseases which share the same symptoms, and killing someone the characters love, are all common themes between the two stories.
In “The Tell Tale Heart” an anonymous narrator has a strange psychological disease, which causes him to fixate on an eye. Our storyteller sets out upon a quest to defend his sanity, making a vivid picture of the old man's eye, grotesque and vulture-like in nature; he further explains how it haunted him to the brink of insanity. “He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold--very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (1). In the narrator’s mind he sees the eye as being separate from the old man whom he loves; although in order to rid himself of the eye, the old man must die. The eye of the old man seems to have triggered the narrator’s madness.
Poe uses the symbol of an eye once again in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to signify another one of his character's insanities. When the narrator gets to the house of Usher he describes it as a “Mansion of gloom” with “Vacant eye-like windows”(1). The gloom and disrepair of the outside is a clear ...
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...es the repetition of mental illness throughout many of his stories, leaving readers with more questions than answers. Masterfully he uses this theme leaving readers unsure of what and who, they can believe. The narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” loves the old man, although he kills him because of his clouded over eye. Similarly Roderick Usher from“The Fall of the House of Usher,” buries his sister Madeline alive. This repeating symbol of insanity and madness manifests in both stories throughout themes of an eye, mental diseases, and murdering someone they love.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar A. ""The Tell-Tale Heart"" Poe's Short Stories. By Edgar A. Poe. Baltimore: Saturday Visiter, 1843. 1-5. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan, and Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009. 1-17. Print.
Throughout Poe’s short story he showed examples of iconography and how they showed throughout the story. In the story an example of iconography would be when the narrator killed the old man that he was taking care of, although he had done nothing to the narrator. Another prime example would be the old man’s “Evil Eye” (Poe) as described by the narrator in Poe’s story. The evil eye is what drove the narrator mad and is what led him to kill the old man at the end of the novel. Throughout most horror genre stories the person that commits the crime is usually mentally unstable and spends their time throughout the story fighting with their unstable mind. This is the same case throughout The Tell Tale Heart; the narrator throughout the story tried to justify his insanity but then lost it all at the end and turned himself in to the
Bleak, sinister, and dreary are often the words that come to mind when one thinks of Edgar Allen Poe’s literature. Poe is notorious for his morbid short stories and poems, in which he repeatedly tries to invoke the feelings of fear and suspense in his audience.“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a story about a ‘madman’ who takes the readers through his own act of cold-blooded murder. Poe uses repetition in order to build both suspense and anxiety and create the story’s mood. Poe also uses hyperboles, and word choice to disturb the reader.
In the story, “The Fall of The House of Usher”, there are many mysterious happenings that go on throughout the story between the characters Roderick Usher and the narrator. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe uses themes such as madness and insanity to connect the house back to Roderick Usher. In the “Fall of The House of Usher”, the narrator goes through many different experiences when arriving to the house. The narrator’s experiences start out as almost unnoticeable in the beginning, turn into bigger ones right before his eyes, and end up becoming problems that cause deterioration of the mind and the house before the narrator even decides to do anything helpful for Roderick and his mental illness. In “The Fall of The House of Usher”, Edgar Allan Poe uses comparison between the physical House of Usher and the family of Usher to describe that looks can be deceiving and that little problems can lead to later downfall.
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator realizes that he absences a reason for killing the old man he lives with. He even starts to admit having to love the man. He states, “There was no reason for what I did. I did not hate the old man; I even loved him. He had never hurt me. I did not want his money. I think it was his eye” (Poe 64). Psychosis is seen in the difficult rationality the narrator uses to defend his murder. The logic the narrator provides is that he thinks the desire to murder the old man results from the man’s eye, which bothers him. He says, “When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!” (Poe 65). The fact that by this man’s eye is what makes him very angry is such a irrelevant reason for the narrator to kill him. This proves that he is not mentally stable, anyone in their right state of mind would not want to commit such a crime due to an irritation of someone’s eye. This represents the idea that this narrator expresses his complete lack of sanity through the premeditation and planning he put into committing the murder. In the beginning of the story, he says “vulture eye” giving the impression that he is uncertain that the eye is the reason for the murder, he also says how he thinks it’s the eye, he uses past tense as opposed to declaring with certainty that this is why the killing of the man. This shows the contrast to how as a sane person would be sure that this is their reason for killing another person before committing.
Edgar Allan Poe is the skilled author of The Fall of the House of Usher, a story that especially emphasizes mood and has the theme that fear is your worst enemy. He brings a feeling of mystery and eeriness to his readers by describing with colorful words the location and condition of the the House of Usher, the narrator’s thoughts, Usher’s strange disposition, and the peculiar circumstances under which the narrator decides to visit him. Poe’s use of mood follows the Gothic Romantic way of exploring the darker side of human nature.
Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, sets a tone that is dark, gloomy, and threatening. His inclusion of highly descriptive words and various forms of figurative language enhance the story’s evil nature, giving the house and its inhabitants eerie and “supernatural” qualities. Poe’s effective use of personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, and ultimately causing, the fall of (the house of) Usher.
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence,” Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is famous in the writing world and has written many amazing stories throughout his gloomy life. At a young age his parents died and he struggled with the abuse of drugs and alcohol. A great amount of work he created involves a character that suffers with a psychological problem or mental illness. Two famous stories that categorize Poe’s psychological perspective would be “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both of these stories contain many similarities and differences of Poe’s psychological viewpoint.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The American Tradition in Literature. Ed. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. ___________________: McGraw Hill., 2008. Pg-pg. Print.
In conclusion, Poe shows the insanity of the narrator through the claims of the narrator as to why he is not insane, the actions of the narrator bring out the narrative irony of the story, and the character of the narrator fits the definition of insanity as it applies to "The Tell Tale Heart". The "Tell Tale Heart" is a story about how insanity can overtake someone's mind and cause one to behave irrationally.
Through the first person narrator, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how man's imagination is capable of being so vivid that it profoundly affects people's lives. The manifestation of the narrator's imagination unconsciously plants seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an unmanageable situation for which there is no room for reason and which culminates in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lends itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death would monetarily benefit the narrator. Moreover, the narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator's obsession with the old man's eye culminates in his own undoing as he is engulfed with internal conflict and his own transformation from confidence to guilt.
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. After reading the story, the audience is left wondering whether the guilt created the madness, or vice versa.
Edgar Allen Poe was an American Writer who wrote within the genre of horror and science fiction. He was famous for writing psychologically thrilling tales examining the depths of the human psyche. This is true of the Tell-Tale Heart, where Poe presents a character that appears to be mad because of his obsession to an old mans, ‘vulture eye’. Poe had a tragic life from a young age when his parents died. This is often reflected in his stories, showing characters with a mad state of mind, and in the Tell Tale Heart where the narrator plans and executes a murder.
If there is one thing that is widely agreed upon in regards to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” it is surely the fact that the short story is one of the greatest ever written. The very words that Poe selects and the manner in which he pieced them was nothing short of phenomenal. This however, is pretty much all that people are able to agree upon. Indeed, to almost everyone who reads it sees the story as great, but for different reasons. In a way the tale can be compared to a psychiatrist’s inkblots. While everyone may be looking at the same picture, they all see different things. What mainly gives “The Fall of the House of Usher” this quality is the double meanings and symbols Poe seems to use throughout.