Parallelism In The Tell Tale Heart

A Tale of a Raging Heart In each person lies a beating heart tattooing their lives to the insides of their rib cages. Each beat bringing them closer to the inevitable. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” readers listen to the raging heartbeat of the elusive main character that sets out to murder the old man living in his house. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” certainly conveys the narrator’s identification with the old man, and illustrates the narrator’s ultimate self destruction; however, Poe most effectively presents the narrator’s obsession with the eye of the old man. Poe creates the narrator’s identification with the old man through grave diction and concise syntax, especially in the description of the narrator stalking

As displayed while the narrator stalks the old man, Poe utilizes parallelism and symbolism to emphasize the all consuming obsession of the narrator. In the beginning of the story the narrator embarks on his mission to kill the old man, after seeing the old man’s eye claiming that “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. …I think it was his eye! He had the eye of a vulture... and by so degrees –very gradually –I made my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe1). Poe utilizes parallelism to emphasize that the eye is the true motive behind the murder when he says, “Object there was none. Passion there was none” (1) validating that the narrator has convinced himself the eye is the source of all evils and must destroy the “eye” which sparks an all consuming obsession. This obsession is also backed by the earlier purpose of self identification, if he identifies closely with the old man, the eyes of the old man are the only ones that can truly see through his façade- and therein becomes a weakness that must be destroyed. Following this weakness critic Charles E.May delves into the narrator’s obsession claiming that “If we relate the motif of the narrator’s identification with the old man to his obsession with the eye, we can see that...what the narrator really wants to destroy is the not the eye but that which sound like the ‘eye’ --that is the, ‘I’ ”(May1). This corroborates the purpose of the eye, as it validates the narrator 's unquenchable obsession with the eye. Furthermore Poe utilizes symbolism when the narrator states “...I found the eye always closed; and it was so impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.”(Poe 3). Poe clearly addresses the fact of the eye becoming the source of all animosity when he says “...it was not