The Tell-Tale Heart - Essay Example

?The Tell-Tale Heart: An Analysis Edgar Allan Poe's writing style is dominated by thrill and mystery. He is mystified by the critical thinking order,a human can possess. His story “The tell tale heart” is the true picture of his keen observation of human mind and its working. The narrator seems insane due to the fact that every man on earth has the inner struggle about right and wrong acts. He, on the other hand, pictured this moralist of his inside as a real man of flash and blood which actually manifested him to weight his capabilities which were no less than any average man of intellect. This paper aims to analyze this marvellous and excellently written short story by discussing the characters, themes, symbols, textual details and imagery. The Tell Tale Heart may be categorized as a horror short story. The story is written in a first-person narrative style. The story opens with the explanation of horrified feelings and terror. These feelings if observed more closely are the remembrance of those terrifying events and things from the past (Quinn 1998, p. 394). The tell tale heart, is a story narrated by a mentally unstable and over suspicious man. It determines the mental conflicts within the narrator's mind but eventually ends up in murdering his innocent housemate, a pale blue eyed old man. Yet he claims his sanity and stability of mind and tries to bring logic in his cruel act. He kept on insisting about not being crazy and talks about his cold blooded and vicious planning of murder (Bloom 2002, pp. 70-71). He does try to satisfy himself by admitting killing the old man due to fear of his pale blue coloured eyes but he could not get rid of the guilt of his actions due to which he kept hearing old man's loud heart thumping sound and blows his own cover in front of the officers by confessing his crime. The narrator of The Tell Tale Heart seems and convincingly was a mentally unstable person who was dangerous and lost his control in his life, his obsession led to his destruction eventually. He felt hostile about his identity and wanted to stay anonymous. From the beginning he tried to protect his view about life as correct and his over imaginative and suspicious nature as peculiar sensitivity of sensing danger around. The narrator of “The tell tale heart” is a killer of an innocent man. The narrator of the story seemed well planned and gave acute time to his course in action, leaving no choice for the victim at all. The Tell Tale heart’s narrator waited for 7 nights and murdered the already scared man randomly on the 8th night. The factor of fear is even involved here; he could not stand the fear of his pale blue eyes. The tell tale heart’s narrator was a confused mind person who refused to be insane but did admit the fact that his actions were of a right cause and planned until he chopped the body and hid it under the floorboards. Due to his heighten sensitivity of listening to different sounds, he was unable to distinguish between the real and imaginative sounds so he confessed his crime and but did call the police officers villain as he could not distinguish between his own actions which were vicious. The Tell Tale Heart is the story which describes the feelings of conflict within a person. The use of unambiguous sentence structures and incompleteness of the narrations the author clearly illustrates the conflicts that are prevalent in the narrator’s mind. The unstable mental condition of the narrator is also obvious from the choice of words, unstructured sentences and improper expressing ways by the narrator. The story is tense and the narrator keeps this tension increasing gradually throughout the story until the end when the narrator accepts his sin of killing an innocent person. The story portrays violent act of murdering someone due to the inner obsession with the old man’s eyes. The insanity of the narrator is exposed through the extreme reaction of that obsession in killing him. The narrator does not have control over his actions and reactions which is also a predictor of an insane or unstable mind. Guilt and fear are the two major themes of the story. The story continuously exposes the narrators inner fear of the outside world and people through the symbol of ‘old man’s eyes’. The narrator seems uncomfortable and disgusted by the fact that the old man is watching him or keeping him in view. This may be linked with the feeling of discomfort and fear from the outside world. The narrator’s fear with the eyes and mental instability leading to increased fear resulted in the demise of the old man. The story’s tension increases as the narrator narrates his brutal act of killing someone without blaming himself for it. His justifications and claims to defend his act all go in vain as the feeling of guilt takes over. Guilt plays a vital role in reaching the end of the story. The narrator seems unconvinced by the fact that mad or insane people may feel guilty of killing someone. The narrator tries to save himself from the inner conflicts of finding the reality of his act in terms of morally correct and incorrect reactions. The feeling of guilt, however, rejects all other propositions and takes over the unstable mind of the narrator. Poe’s narrator makes use of the setting, tone, sentence structure, dialogues and setting to prove that even insane individuals feel the overwhelmingly strong inner forces of guilt and fear. His narrator continuously describes these two feelings directly or indirectly. The narrator proves that insanity is not a justification of morally wrong actions. This may also be taken as a reason behind Poe’s writing which is to evade the reality that insanity does not constitute a true judgement of a person’s inhuman acts. Confession is another important feature of this story. The narrator in the start accuses himself of being insane. The story progresses and by the end, the reader observes him to defend his sanity by pointing towards his clever yet vicious acts of hiding his crimes. He provides details of his calculated and measured acts in order to defend his sanity. His account of ‘vulture-eye’ and the overly sensitive behaviour with the old-man’s eyes are questionable when judging him as sane. The narrator puts a gap between the old man and his eyes from which he fears. He distinguishes his eyes from his body and considers them to be frightening and claims his love for the old man. This again is an exposition of inner conflict and unreliability of his mental state. Silverman (1993, p. 30) suggests that the use of the word ‘True!’ in the beginning is an acceptance of the narrator’s guilt. The way the story begins with some short and interesting but unorganized words captures the whole concentration of the reader (Meyers 1992, p. 101). The beginning leaves the reader in a curiosity to know what’s true, what’s insane about it and so on. Poe uses economic technique of using meaningful but lesser quantity of words. The narrator uses all possible techniques to prove his sanity and in doing so he even mistakes to admit his guilt of committing a crime. This story does not provide the narrator to be insisting on his innocence but sanity. The sound of heartbeats and the confusion of distinguishing between the real and unreal noise that he hears are the true translators of conflicts that existed in the narrator and the feeling of guilt that he had been avoiding (Howarth 1971, p. 94). Poe provides the images of the scene in an efficient manner. The beauty of his words involved the reader completely in the scene. When he describes the terror of eyes, the reader actually feels that and when he explains how the narrator moves to his room for 7 nights; the reader imagines the scene clearly. The author’s writing style is not descriptive yet imaginative. The author symbolizes the feelings of the narrator by the heart/heartbeat sounds, lamp, the eye and some others. The vulture eye is the representative of evil to the narrator. The eye is the true reason behind all the fear which gave rise to the action and climax in the story. The lamp represented the truth that the old man was innocent and did not harm the narrator in any way ever. The heartbeat is an obvious representative of the guilt that narrator had. The heartbeat of a dead old man was obviously not real and the unreal voices are the depiction of inner feelings of the perpetrator of the violent act or the ‘murderer’ in this case. In conclusion, we can say that The Tell Tale Heart is a masterpiece of Poe. It is one of the gems in the collection of short stories. The idea of Poe is different and distinguishes itself from the stories and literature of that era. This short story carried great depth and requires the reader to fully involve himself in the plot and characters to live the picture of the story. The story is full of literary elements which are further beautified by the writing skills of Poe. Bibliography: Bloom, Harold. Edgar Allan Poe. Broomall, Pa: Chelsea House, 2002. Print. Howarth, William L. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Print. Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan, and J. Gerald. Kennedy. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. Quinn, Arthur H. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Print. Silverman, Kenneth. New Essays on Poe's Major Tales. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Print. Read More