Seeing Beyond The Eye: The Tell-Tale Heart

“The Tell Tale Heart” is a famous short story written by Edgar Allen Poe. The story was first published in 1843. This story is about an unnamed man who kills an elderly man due to his “vulture eye”. The man serves as the narrator in this story and describes to readers in detail as he carefully stalks the man, kills him and hides his body under his floorboards after he cuts him up. Eventually, the narrator’s guilt eats him alive to the point that he confesses his crime to three visiting policemen. His guilt takes form as the old man’s heart, which he believes is still beating underneath the floorboards. This short story is considered one of the Poe’s most famous short stories as well as a Gothic fiction classic.

Tell-Tale Heart In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator is a man who believes he is sane but he is far from it…. In other words, he is crazy. The story begins with the narrator describing the motive to murder an old man. This was because of the man’s eye and how it resembled that of a vulture’s eye.

First, the narrator says that the old man's cloudy eye is evil and that he is sane. As a

To begin, the narrator talks about how he wants to kill the old man because of his vulture eye. “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!” This quote explains

It is because of this "evil eye" landing on him that the narrator decides he must murder the man. Why must the narrator be rid of the eye’s gaze? The eye has been separated from the old man, who is kind. The narrator’s insanity has caused this separation to happen. Once the eye is separate from the old man, it becomes murderousness object to the narrator” (Ramirez Web).

Ultimately, the narrator tells his story of killing the old man to possibly redeem himself and give reason

The motivation for murder according to the narrator was “not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (Poe 922). However, it is possible that the eye symbolizes a necrosis of the narrator’s spirit. The narrator uses terms such as “infuriate”, “hideous”, “vulture” and “dammed” when describing the eye (Poe 923). These words are often used to describe the demonization of individuals who commit irrational crimes against humanity, such as the crime our narrator is confessing to, the murder and dismemberment of an innocent old man in his sleep. In “The Physiognomical Meaning of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”, Edward W. Pritcher states “it

Research Essay: “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe, is a story of a nauseating death. Murder as an upshot of an eye; literally. Incongruous actions are taken by Poe when he determines the fate of a man he claims love upon, all because “He had the eye of a vulture” (Poe), and Poe plots the death of this old man. As noted in Short Story Criticism, it’s stated that; What precipitated the narrator’s insanity and the subsequent murder was his irrational obsession with the old man’s so called “Evil Eye.” The narrator freely admits to his auditors that this was his Primmum mobile: “yes, it was this!

As he proclaims his own sanity, the narrator fixates on the old man’s vulture-eye. He reduces the old man to the pale blue of his eye in obsessive fashion. He wants to separate the man from his “Evil Eye” so he can spare the man the burden of guilt that he attributes to the eye itself. The narrator fails to see that the eye is the “I” of the old man, an inherent part of his identity that cannot be isolated as the narrator perversely

The narrator portrays, in momentous detail, the old man’s “vulture eye” and how it drove him feel. He extrapolates that the eye “resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” He then expressed that “whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold” and that “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.” The narrator felt horror and aversion toward the eye to such a tremendous extent that he was willing to and wished to murder the old man. In the end, he completed this task, which, although it drove him to total madness, got rid of the annoyance and animosity that he felt toward the “evil eye”.

Edgar Allen Poe was known for his dark-romanticism writings which evoked horror in readers. Seen specifically in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, readers are able to get into the mind of the mentally ill narrator who murders an elderly man, one whom he claimed to love. Poe created conflict in this story by having the narrator admit to loving the man and having him be his caretaker. Conflict, and the story line, is created because it makes readers question why he would commit such a heinous crime as killing and dismembering the man. Readers eventually find out that it is the elderly man’s eye that pushes the narrator to do what he does. The narrator is trying to justify his actions and prove his sanity by explaining how he observes

own chamber. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell Tale Heart, the story of this murder is told from the point of view of the killer. The narrator tells of the man’s vulture-like eye, which causes him to murder the man to rid himself forever of the villainy the eye possessed. After the murder, the narrator is haunted by the sound of the man’s beating heart to the point that he has to admit to his felony. In this ghastly tale, the narrator is guilty of premeditated murder because he had a reason to kill the man, knew right from wrong throughout the story, and had a plan to kill the old man in advance.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the main character was deeply disturbed not by a cat’s eye but, by a man’s eye. He described that the eye had the same look as that of a vulture’s (Poe). It was “a pale blue, with film over it” (Poe 702). Every night at mid-night, the obsessive man would sneak into the other man’s room and watch to see if his “vulture” eye was open; but, the man was always soundly asleep. On one particular evening, the man’s eye was wide open and the sight of his eye made him furious (Poe). He decided to drag the man to the floor and smother him with his own bed until he was dead.

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.

It can show fantasy, darkness and it is possible that the old man in the story never existed. It is the capacity of the narrator’s imagination which makes him creates the old man. It all seems that nothing that he says happens in real life. For instance, the old man eyes, heartbeat, the night, the police, and so on, are all fruits of his fantasy. The eyes could represent his psychological sin and guilt, and the old man depicts his own personality. He wants to get rid of the eyes because it has a darkness sin which does not allow him to have a good sanity. The narrator separates the old man’s personality to his eye, and in the end, he assumes by getting rid of the eyes he could still love the man and live in peace with his mental sanity. However, this strategy does not work out well and turned against him because does not only kill the eyes but also the old