Insanity is a repetitious theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s work, having fun taunting and teasing his readers with dark subjects. Poe’s writing contains topics that make people feel uncomfortable; his characters have inconsistencies that leave readers scratching their heads. Poe creates two prime examples of inconsistent characters including the unnamed narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart,” and Roderick Usher from “The Fall of the House of Usher.” These two stories have frequent similarities concerning the topic of madness. The symbol of an eye, diseases which share the same symptoms, and killing someone the characters love, are all common themes between the two stories.
In “The Tell Tale Heart” an anonymous narrator has a strange psychological disease, which causes him to fixate on an eye. Our storyteller sets out upon a quest to defend his sanity, making a vivid picture of the old man's eye, grotesque and vulture-like in nature; he further explains how it haunted him to the brink of insanity. “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--very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (1). In the narrator’s mind he sees the eye as being separate from the old man whom he loves; although in order to rid himself of the eye, the old man must die. The eye of the old man seems to have triggered the narrator’s madness.
Poe uses the symbol of an eye once again in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to signify another one of his character's insanities. When the narrator gets to the house of Usher he describes it as a “Mansion of gloom” with “Vacant eye-like windows”(1). The gloom and disrepair of the outside is a clear ...
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...es the repetition of mental illness throughout many of his stories, leaving readers with more questions than answers. Masterfully he uses this theme leaving readers unsure of what and who, they can believe. The narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” loves the old man, although he kills him because of his clouded over eye. Similarly Roderick Usher from“The Fall of the House of Usher,” buries his sister Madeline alive. This repeating symbol of insanity and madness manifests in both stories throughout themes of an eye, mental diseases, and murdering someone they love.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar A. ""The Tell-Tale Heart"" Poe's Short Stories. By Edgar A. Poe. Baltimore: Saturday Visiter, 1843. 1-5. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan, and Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009. 1-17. Print.
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
Edgar Allan Poe utilizes a wide range of methods to entice the reader into his piece, “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The storyline follows the events of a murder of an old man, in the perspective of the killer who claims he is mentally stable. The writer uses syntax, focusing on sentence length, and tone to emphasize that the narrator is not truly stable, thus not being a reliable perspective.
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.
The narrator believes he is justified in killing the old man because the man has an Evil Eye. The narrator claims the old man's eye made his blood run cold and the eye looked as if it belonged to a vulture. Poe shows the narrator is insane because the narrators' actions bring out the narrative irony used in "The Tell Tale Heart".... ... middle of paper ...
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, sets a tone that is dark, gloomy, and threatening. His inclusion of highly descriptive words and various forms of figurative language enhance the story’s evil nature, giving the house and its inhabitants eerie and “supernatural” qualities. Poe’s effective use of personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, and ultimately causing, the fall of (the house of) Usher.
Poe reinforces issues of morality in "The Tell-Tale Heart" through the state of madness. In this story, Poe provides an analysis of paranoia and mental worsening or deterioration. Poe distributed this story in great detail to intensify the murderer’s (i.e. It’s ironic how the narrator loves the old man, but the narrator compassionately plans to kill the old man because of his evil eye. This situation underscores virtue through the contradiction in how the narrator plans to kill the old man but he somehow has affection towards the old man.
...binson, E. Arthur. "Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales. ED. William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. 94-102.
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.
If there is one thing that is widely agreed upon in regards to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” it is surely the fact that the short story is one of the greatest ever written. The very words that Poe selects and the manner in which he pieced them was nothing short of phenomenal. This however, is pretty much all that people are able to agree upon. Indeed, to almost everyone who reads it sees the story as great, but for different reasons. In a way the tale can be compared to a psychiatrist’s inkblots. While everyone may be looking at the same picture, they all see different things. What mainly gives “The Fall of the House of Usher” this quality is the double meanings and symbols Poe seems to use throughout.
Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.
The Tale Tell Heart” is a short story in which Edgar Allen Poe, the author, illustrates the madness and complexity of an individual. The unnamed narrator, who is Poe’s main character, is sharing his story of him murdering an old man on the sole reason of his dislike for his filmy blue eye, which reminds him of a vulture. He meticulously plans the murder of this old man, and attempts to cover up the act through his twister persona. In the "Tell-Tale Heart", Poe uses satire, imagery, and symbolism to portray how startlingly perverted the mind of the narrator is and how guilt always prevails.
In “The Tell Tale Heart” Edgar Allan Poe builds up suspense by guiding us through the darkness that dwells inside his character’s heart and mind. Poe masterfully demonstrates the theme of guilt and its relationship to the narrator’s madness. In this classic gothic tale, guilt is not simply present in the insistently beating heart. It insinuates itself earlier in the story through the old man’s eye and slowly takes over the theme without remorse. Through his writing, Poe directly attributes the narrator’s guilt to his inability to admit his illness and offers his obsession with imaginary events - The eye’s ability to see inside his soul and the sound of a beating heart- as plausible causes for the madness that plagues him. After reading the story, the audience is left wondering whether the guilt created the madness, or vice versa.
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence,” Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is famous in the writing world and has written many amazing stories throughout his gloomy life. At a young age his parents died and he struggled with the abuse of drugs and alcohol. A great amount of work he created involves a character that suffers with a psychological problem or mental illness. Two famous stories that categorize Poe’s psychological perspective would be “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both of these stories contain many similarities and differences of Poe’s psychological viewpoint.
“The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.” University of Virginia, n.d. Web. 27 March, 2014.
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.