Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe is arguably the greatest writer/poet in the genre of Gothic Literature. He has written many short stories in which a well known one is "The Tell-Tale Heart". The short story ”The Tell-Tale Heart” is told in first person because it uses I, but the narrator is unknown. During the story the unknown narrator is presumed mentally ill or disturbed for the reasons that he constantly argues with himself, he tries to convince the audience that he is not mad, and he is obsessed with the old man’s “vulture eye”. In the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator claims he has a “disease” that has sharpened his sense of hearing in which he hears “all things in the heaven and in the earth… [And] many things in hell”. He then asks,
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The eye is opened this time which causes the narrator’s hearing to heighten. He claims to hear the old man’s heart beating. Finally, the heartbeat gets too loud so the narrator suffocates the old man with his own bed. He dismembers the old man’s body and then hides them under the floor boards of his house. Later, three policemen show up and he invites them in and allows them to search the house. He says the old man is out of town. The policemen stay and chat, but the narrator’s head starts to hurt because of a ringing in his ears. The ringing gets louder and louder; it gets so loud he can’t take it anymore and assumes the policemen know everything. The narrator shouts, “Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the planks!-here, here!-it is the beating of his hideous heart!” Analyzing how he killed the old man, the killing of a person with suffocation usually means that the killer is a sexual sadist and likes to feel the struggle of his kill. Something interesting he says is, “…so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye-not even his- could have detected anything wrong”. He acts as if the eye is cunning not the person, kind of like the eye is the person. A theory I have on why the narrator despised the eye so much is that you can tell many things by a person’s eyes. The eyes tell so much, like when a person is happy, sad, lying, and many more emotions. Eyes kind of have their own identity, so maybe this milky-pale blue eye did not have an identity which freaked out the narrator so
The eye is opened this time which causes the narrator’s hearing to heighten. He claims to hear the old man’s heart beating. Finally, the heartbeat gets too loud so the narrator suffocates the old man with his own bed. He dismembers the old man’s body and then hides them under the floor boards of his house. Later, three policemen show up and he invites them in and allows them to search the house. He says the old man is out of town. The policemen stay and chat, but the narrator’s head starts to hurt because of a ringing in his ears. The ringing gets louder and louder; it gets so loud he can’t take it anymore and assumes the policemen know everything. The narrator shouts, “Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the planks!-here, here!-it is the beating of his hideous heart!” Analyzing how he killed the old man, the killing of a person with suffocation usually means that the killer is a sexual sadist and likes to feel the struggle of his kill. Something interesting he says is, “…so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye-not even his- could have detected anything wrong”. He acts as if the eye is cunning not the person, kind of like the eye is the person. A theory I have on why the narrator despised the eye so much is that you can tell many things by a person’s eyes. The eyes tell so much, like when a person is happy, sad, lying, and many more emotions. Eyes kind of have their own identity, so maybe this milky-pale blue eye did not have an identity which freaked out the narrator so