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Symbolism In Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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Your mind is one of the most powerful things you obtain. It controls your thoughts, your actions, and your feelings. However, sometimes our mind makes us see things in a different perspective than how they actually are. Our mind can play with our conscience, whether we want it to or not. The narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart demonstrates this problem. In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator tries to convince the reader that he is not mad by stating that his disease sharpened his senses, which to him meant that he was perfectly fine. Nevertheless, his sharpened senses influenced him that an old man’s eye was a threat to his life, which led him to killing the man, thus ridding himself of the eye forever. However, at the end of the story, his mind begins to wonder about the possibility of getting caught, and when his heart begins to beat faster and louder from guilt, he is convinced the …show more content…

As I stated before, the theme of the story is that sometimes the hardest battle is the one inside your mind. The author’s use of symbols in the tale supports this theme very well. The narrator’s heart represents guilt, which can make you feel worried and nervous. This feeling can make it harder to make decisions, and your mind struggles to determine what is right and what is wrong. The narrator’s disease represents misinterpretation. His illness was causing him to think that his sharper senses was a normal, positive thing, when in reality it was causing him to see and think about things in a different way that leads him to committing radical acts. The “vulture eye” of the old man represents paranoia and insecurities, two things that influence people in a negative way. The narrator developed a phobia of the elderly man’s eye, and it influenced him to kill the man. Likewise, paranoias and insecurities often influence people into doing things that they probably would not have done in the first

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“ The Tell-Tale Heart” Interpretive Essay Is the complex character created by Edgar Allan Poe a calculated killer or a delusional madman. In the short story “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the main character has a mental condition which causes him to kill a neighbor. He believes that his neighbor has a “vulture eye” which is the reason why he killed him. Night after night, he watches the man and plans how to kill him. Then one night, he puts his plan into action.

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He refers to himself as Death, implying he has all knowledge and power over the old man. The reader becomes filled with dread as the man patiently waits to kill. The imagery portrayed in “The Tell-tale Heart” increases the demented tone that the narrator projects as the main character waits to strangle the old man. Every night, for a week, the murderer would “look in” upon the victim as he slept.

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and observe how healthily” (Poe 303). The narrator shares an event from the past which he tells us about his hatred for this old man’s eye which resembled that of a “vulture, a pale blue eye, with a film over it”(Poe 303). The narrator uses these illustrative images of this pernicious eye to assist in building the plot. He is trying to convince readers that all of this is because of the “Evil eye”(Poe 303).

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator defends his sanity after murdering the old man under his care. Although he repeatedly claims that he is mentally stable, the narrator’s thought process and behaviors suggest that he is indeed insane. The narrator’s lack of reason and auditory hallucinations provide proof of his insanity. Throughout the story the man shows a large lack of reason.

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Stories can often lead readers down rabbit holes due to unreliable narrators. When the narrator can not be trusted, it becomes difficult to understand the reality of the situation. In Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell Tale Heart,” the main character is a caretaker and he discusses this disease he has, and some claim he has just gone mad. The old man whom he cares for has an eye condition that sends him into a fit of rage strong enough to want to kill him ridding himself of the eye forever. He stalks the old man for a week then kills him one night.

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At a moments notice, the narrator could do anything. Moreover, this fact continues throughout the story all the way to the end. The Narrator acts extremely excited after the fact that he has killed the Old Man, yet this façade is completely abolished when confronted by the police, as he is overtaken by the guilt of the murder. Another character in the story is the old man, who also creates fear and dread in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The old man, being oblivious to what is happening around him, is struck by paranoia as throughout the night sounds have been heard around him.

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The Tell-Tale Heart is a story about an insane narrator claiming to his sanity after murdering an old man out of anxiety and panic. Many believe the evidence points to the narrator being a calculated killer. After reviewing the symptoms of the narrator I believe him to be a man plagued with anxiety issues and panic attacks. First of all, the only reason the narrator had for such crime was of his eye, the eye of a vulture, nothing else. Not for his gold, property, or vengeance just his eye.

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This shows that he is not in control of his own morals because a trivial reason made him want to kill someone he loved. So, how could you say that he is fully in control of what he is doing if he were to kill someone he loved for a trivial reason? Overall, the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” kills a man, but he is not guilty due to the reason of insanity. The narrator is not guilty because he has impulsive behavior when he cuts up the old man.

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There are times in life where people do commit a small mistake, or a huge crime, but what really matters is if one will listen to their conscience. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the main character lives with an old man who has an eye that “resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The story revolves around the main character’s obsession over the eye, and how he got rid of it-- by murdering the old man. Towards the end of the story, the young man confesses to the police about his insane stunt after they searched his house. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe focused on having the reader know more than the secondary character, using description, and using a first-person narrator, to build suspense.

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It usually implies a revelation as a defense of sanity. In the tales of the criminal insanity, first-person narrators are the protagonists, focusing on their conflicts with hysteria and law. In The Tell-tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe uses many symbols such as, the Evil Eye, the watch, the narrator himself, bedroom, and the lantern. He also tries to dehumanize the old man in the short story.

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While Edgar Allan Poe as the narrator of the The Tell-Tale Heart has the reader believe that he was indeed sane, his thoughts and actions throughout the story would prove otherwise. As the short story unfolds, we see the narrator as a man divided between his love for the old man and his obsession with the old man’s eye. The eye repeatedly becomes the narrator’s pretext for his actions, and while his delusional state caused him much aggravation, he also revealed signs of a conscience. In the first paragraph of the short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe establishes an important tone that carries throughout his whole story, which is ironic.

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The beating heart is symbolic of our narrator's intense feelings of guilt over what he has done. When investigators arrive, his own beating heart begins to antagonize him, and our narrator hears its pangs as the victim's heart pumps beneath his floorboards. The narrator loses it once and for all as he rips up his floorboards to reveal the dead body he was stashing, which was a direct result of his own heartbeat mimicking that of his deceased victim. In this sense, the beating heart represents truth and how it will ultimately come out.

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In The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe the narrator is guilty of murder because the narrator thinks the old man could never suspect that his caregiver would ever try to kill him, he claims he can recite the story calmly and healthily as he remembers every detail unlike an insane person , and he admits to killing the old man so he is aware he has committed murder. It is important to realize that the narrator is too presumptuous because the old man would never think his caregiver would try to kill him when he expresses this statement “So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that at every night, Just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.’’ ( Poe 7).

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Obsession, internal conflict, and underlying guilt are all aspects of being human but when it’s associated with paranoia and insanity it may be just the recipe for the perfect crime as perceived by Edger Allan Poe in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Poe uses this as one of his shortest stories to discuss and provide an insight into the mind of the mentally ill, paranoia and the stages of mental detrition. The story 's action is depicted through the eyes of the unnamed delusional narrator. The other main character in the story is an old man whom the narrator apparently works for and resides in his house. The story opens off with the narrator trying to assure his sanity then proceeding to tell the tale of his crime, this shows a man deranged and hunted with a guilty conscience of his murderous act.

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No sane person would think of doing such a thing, they would just avoid seeing the old man. Instead, the narrator chooses to kill the old man which does not make sense to the average, but to him, this is the only way to relieve himself of the eye. As the narrator craziness increases throughout the story, one can see how the eye of the old

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