The Impact of Fear
Fear is a feeling that people wish they could escape and not have control their life. However, fear is a valuable asset to life. Fear is what holds us back from going swimming in the ocean at dawn, after hearing about a shark attack. Without fear, there would be nothing to withhold us from irrational acts. Fear can also become overbearing, it can thwart any rational thoughts and cause paranoia to consume all. Through terror, paranoia can overcome rational thoughts and cloud judgment. As portrayed in “The Masque of Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” without any rationality fear leads to rash acts. Edgar Allen Poe uses symbolism, irony, and imagery to illustrate how fear can influence perceptions of reality, and the repercussions of their acts.
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Symbolism is used to communicate the obsession over guilt and death.
In ¨The Tell-Tale Heart,¨ the obsession over the eye slowly drives the narrator to the brink of sanity. “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture----- a pale blue eye, with a film over it,” (74). The eye symbolizes paranoia. The narrator thought the eye followed him around, and it drove him to his breaking point. He becomes so disturbed and obsessed by the eye that he believes the only way to get rid of it would be to kill the old man. After killing the man, the narrator thought his paranoia would go away and he could live an undisturbed life. However, his guiltiness never allows him to feel at
rest. Irony in the texts show that evilness and death cannot be avoided. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the old man tries to escape the darkness but it ends up getting to him in the end. “... the thick darkness (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers)...,” (75). This is ironic because the old man locked his home up to make sure the “evil” didn’t come in, but he ends securing himself his death. The narrator was the “evil”, and the old man only sped up his death by locking the narrator inside with him. The old man’s death was inevitable, it was bound to happen, death is avoidable. “The Masque of Red Death,” is similar in the way that the characters think they can avoid confrontation with death. “When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its rôle, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed...,” (60). Prince Prospero thought that he was safe from the ‘Red Death,’ but the plague got in anyway. By welding the castle shut he sealed his death, because there was no way to exit the castle. Prince Prospero tried to eschew death, failed at doing so. In the texts imagery is used to set the tone and show the anxiety. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” uses setting to set the dark and gloomy mood. “To the victims of its tyranny, here was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors,” (66). Edgar Allen Poe uses imagery to show how inadequate the prison is. The prison is described as wretched and detestable. People taken as prisoners never made it out alive, given the situation fear probably overran rationality. When people are put in a life-threatening situation they let fear consume them, and give up hope. The narrator unlike most people, stayed calm and assessed the situation. Due to his quick thinking and cleverness he was able to escape each obstacle and survive. Edgar Allen Poe portrayed throughout the texts the influence fear has on us and the effects of it. The literary devices show us how much control fear has over our life. There are positive factors of fear, it offers us restraint from irrational acts. Fear also keeps us alert, and kicks in adrenaline as a survival instinct. While there are positive aspects to fear, there are also negatives. Paranoia is a symptom of fear, which can also lead to obsession. In the end however, hope and balance will prevail over fear.
The deaths and dangers in the world we face are sometimes made of ourselves and of our fears. In the dark story The Masque of the Red Death the danger being unavoidable death that Prince Prospero shuns away but comes back to kill him. In Young Goodman Brown, the protagonist fears that his faith will be loss and nothing will be good in the world anymore. Both these stories are’ descriptive and use many symbols that connect to fear. While the protagonists in Young Goodman Brown and The Masque of the Red Death are both fearful, Goodman Brown fears of losing his innocence and runs off to find faith but loses it on the way, and the prince in The Masque of Red Death fears losing his riches.
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” murders an elderly man because he is fearful of the man’s “evil eye.” “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; 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 37). The narrator explains that he is haunted by the man’s eye and the only way to
The author, Edgar Allan Poe, using illusion or misdirection keeps the reader is suspense throughout this story called "The Masque of the Red Death". Symbolism such as the colored rooms, the impressive clock, the feeling of celebration being at a party all makes this story feel like a fairytale. Poe used this fairytale style and converts it into a nightmare in disguise.
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe is a short story about an unreliable narrator that commits a crime but rationalizes it by claiming she is not insane. The narrator does not introduce herself, therefore remains unnamed for the entire short story. We have no identifying characteristics about the narrator, perhaps because she doesn’t want us finding her. She tells us how and why she kills the old man but does not want to be identified. It is possible that the narrator is the old man’s caretaker. She states that she does not hate the old man nor does she want any of his money. What really bothers her is the old man’s dead eye. It is pale blue with a film over it. It can be assumed that the old man is blind from one eye. The narrator is hunted by the eye, it overtakes all of her thoughts. She kills the old man so she won’t have to see the eye anymore. The narrator explains that she is not insane because she was very cautious and aware of the murder. The narrator is unreliable because she is mentally ill.
Obsession with murder can lead an unwary victim to an untimely death. The narrator from Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Telltale Heart” insists he remains sane but cannot restrain himself from the inevitable. The narrator becomes bothered, obsessed and fascinated with the old man’s vulture-like eye. One night the narrator pounced on the old man, through him on the floor, and suffocated him with the mattress. The narrator chopped up the body and hid the pieces under three floor boards in his room. The narrator invited the police in and talked for a while. The narrator sat on a chair above the floor boards filled the corpse. The narrator recalled old man’s eye in his mind as it started to bother him so much he screamed out in agony, ripping up the floor boards admitting his wrong doing. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Telltale Heart” the narrator illustrates his insanity through obsession and murder.
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.
In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the storyteller tells of his torment. He is tormented by an old man's Evil Eye. The storyteller had no ill will against the old man himself, even saying that he loved him, but the old man's pale blue, filmy eye made his blood run cold. And when the storyteller couldn't take anymore of the Evil Eye looking at him, he said, "I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever." This is the start of the storyteller’s madness, and as the reader listens to what he says, the madness within the storyteller becomes very apparent.
Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death is an elaborate allegory that combines
The Tell-Tale Heart is a horror story about a man who murders his landlord because of his pale blue ‘vulture eye’. Every night at midnight the murderer goes into the old mans room and shines a thin ray of light on the old mans eye. On the eighth night the murderer went into the old mans room and wakes the man up. Yet again the murderer shines the light on the eye to see that it is open, the murderer then suffocates the landlord within his bed. He later confesses, due to his own guilt, that he had done the deed when police come round to his house to investigate.
The short story “The Tell-Tale Heart is written by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator of the story is anonymous. The narrator tries to convey to readers that he is sane, through his words actually convey his lack of sanity. The victim is an old man 's with a pale blue eye. The narrator wasn 't really want to murder the old man but due to his obsessive, paranoid, he split the old man 's personality into two separate personalities. The narrator separates the old man he loves with an old man with the vulture eye because that eye gives him fearful feeling. After the narrator murders the old man, the narrator hears his own heartbeat due to his anxiety, and his sense of guilt are
... insecurity and paranoia. By leading us through an intricate maze of guilt and denial, Poe raises questions about what differentiates guilt from remorse. The audience begins to wonder if the fixation with the old man’s eye is in fact a cause of the madness or a result of the narrator’s inability to cope with his evil thoughts and the subsequent guilt that such thoughts derive. “The tell-tale heart” takes us through an incredible journey of discovery. By exploring the intrinsic nature of guilt, Poe shows us that without remorse and acceptance of responsibility the only possible result is a never ending cycle of projection, blame and denial that lead to madness.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a young man kills an old man because of his “evil eye”. At first, this story doesn’t seem to connect to the theme of love making one do crazy things, but as the story goes on it is found out that the young man killed the old man out of love because he didn 't want him to suffer with the eyes. He listened to him sleep and knew that he was having inner conflicts, much like the one he himself suffered from. He also killed him because he couldn’t handle watching the “eye”. Out of love, he took him out of this world so he wouldn’t have to suffer
The falling action in the story is when Prospero is caught by the Red Death,
The fixation on the old man's vulture-like eye forces the narrator to concoct a plan to eliminate the old man. The narrator confesses the sole reason for killing the old man is his eye: "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to rid myself of the eye for ever" (34). The narrator begins his tale of betrayal by trying to convince the reader he is not insane, but the reader quickly surmises the narrator indeed is out of control. The fact that the old man's eye is the only motivation to murder proves the narrator is so mentally unstable that he must search for justification to kill. In his mind, he rationalizes murder with his own unreasonable fear of the eye.
...his eye and the fact that the man does this at the same time everynight shows that he has an obsession purely based on this blind eye that the old man has. Guilt is shown after the killing of the old man when the man starts to hear the beating of old man's heart - which is actually the beating of his own heart but fails to recognise this. This is definitely a story that contains an incident or moment of great tension right from the very beginning. From the man speaking openly about the killing of the old man to the climax scene where he finally finishes what he has started and at the end of the story where he admits to the killing of him. The title "the Tell - Tale Heart" basically sum's up the story in four words, meaning a heart who gave something away, but in this case it is referring to the man's ownheart giving away the secret of the murder he had committed.