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

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

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