"The Tell Tale Heart"

Paper Summary:

This paper shows how Edgar Allan Poe in "The Tell Tale Heart" creates an exquisite horror story built around the central symbol of the Tell Tale Heart of the title. This symbol reverberates with underlying symbols of madness and fear and interacts with the image of the vulture eye that must be murdered. The writer explains how the narrator's mind is controlled by fear, and this fear has lead to insanity. When the story starts the narrator has already scared himself out of his wits and at the end he finds exactly what his unbalanced mind is looking for, the absolute in mortal terror.

From the Paper:

"This eye become a symbol, or perhaps even a pun, for the I, or mad self of the narrator. It is an eye with a film over it, an unseeing eye, perhaps the eye of the murderer himself, just as the heartbeat is his own heartbeat. He cannot see into himself. He is so insane that he believes his plan is wise. "Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers, of my sagacity." His mind is so twisted he believes that in bringing fear to the old man he will be able to kill his own fear. He will not kill the old man while the eye is closed. It has to be open. It has to know fear as he kills it. The murderer doesn't understand his own motivation, which is to feed his own fear, as a vulture feeds, unendingly, seeking one carrion corpse after another. Poe works the image so that narrator merges with the eye and the vulture as he destroys himself and the eye (I). "

More papers on "The Tell Tale Heart":

• Analytical Essay # 58794 : "Themes in "The Tell-Tale Heart"
• Article Review # 129127 : "The Tell Tale Heart:" A Tell Tale Story of Incest"
• Book Review # 128040 : "The Terror of Madness in "The Tell-Tale Heart"

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