Symbolism In The Tell-Tale Heart

Eric Burdon once said, “Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It’s a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other.” This quote by Burdon shows us that we have the choice to decide whether we want to do the right or wrong thing. The seed symbolizes us growing and realizing the differences between right and wrong. Even though some people think it’s hard to tell the difference between right and wrong, it is even harder to act upon your decision. If people did not do the wrong things once in awhile, there would be no such thing as good and evil, it would just be good. Doing the wrong thing sometimes shows you the correct path of right decisions, as many people have heard “You can never

In the short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, there is a nervous but confused man, the narrator, who despises an old man because of his ‘evil eye.’ The narrator winds up killing the old man, and hiding him under his own floors. After the narrator killed the old man, the narrator feels extreme guilt as his conscious, represented by his beating heart, eats away at him; causing him to turn himself in to the police. As mentioned above, the beating heart represents the conscious of the narrator. There are two other major symbols as well that contributes to the theme. In the story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” the three major symbols are the heart, the vulture eye, and the watch which are essential to the theme that, deep down we all know the difference between right and wrong, but sometimes we ignore the feeling and tell ourselves

The most important symbol is the heart which was illustrated by the conscious of the narrator. The second most important symbol was the evil eye or also known as the vulture eye that the narrator despises because it represented a different outlooks on the world. The last most important symbol was the watch that symbolized the time until the death of the old man. How someone deals with a situation all depends on how they looks at it. Some people can tell the difference between right or wrong and act upon it; while others don’t know how to do the right thing. The human heart usually can’t handle guilt well when we make a bad choice, and it could potentially turn into madness. Guilt always has a way of eating away at us, just as it did for the narrator after he killed the old man and turned himself in to the police. He says, “--here,here?-- it is the beating of his hideous heart”