Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart is a scintillating narrative that illuminates tragedy on several occasions. It speaks about a protagonist who is a murderer and tries to cajole his audience into believing he is mentally sane while describing his brutish tale. The narrative contains several phases of climactic twists and character plots that define an interpretive story’s thesis. The rational protests forcefully declares suspicions, resulting in misleading allusions to the readers and other characters themselves. Such scenarios conceals the irony and allegory of how tragic stories can be intertwined to achieve character plot and different themes in the narrative.
Several scenarios in the play defines the introductory part as a pivotal point in the story. The narrator begins by whining about rationality which creates suspicion and anguish among the readers. The protagonist’s hatred of the old man’s eyes and the grotesque claims of hell and the heavens invokes a hippie man’s reaction. Moreover, it describes the level of sanity he might possess and the allusion he uses while trying to defend his chaotic act of murder. The scene provides a gothic style that presents selfishness, poor consciousness, and solitude that needs balance. Therefore, the narrator believes that individuals can only be frantic if they aren’t meticulous. However, the organized attempts to murder an old man due to a man’s eyes are absurd. Poe maximizes the inclination of absurdity from the introductory part to the end of the play.
Poe illustrates different themes using several literal devices such as humor and symbolism. The narrator’s eerie chuckles demonstrates his inability to perform anything until he sees the eyes. It is pretty ironic and humorous since he kills because of the gaping eyes of the old man every morning. This illuminates the narrator’s absurdity in the narrative. It marks the beginning of a rivalry between the old man and the narrator, and the old man is not hateful or spiteful in any possible way. Fortunately, the narrator seems sympathetic towards the old man since he is scared of the mortal anxiety he’s faced before, but the empathy perverts to rage and hatred towards the old man’s eyes. It is ironic and paradoxical how a sympathetic man averts himself into evil and murderous because of his gaping eyes.
Additionally, the old man’s eyes invokes a vital point of the narrative giving the play a climactic plot. Poe questions the aspects of symbolism by illuminating how the eyes became the main item of comparability. Body parts are always parts of a gothic figure in Poe’s realm, but the old man’s eyes are exceptional and noticeable as haunting figures in many horror stories. The old man is described by his enormous, awkward potent eyes that come to haunt the readers after the story. Evidence illustrates how symbolism has been achieved when he says, “I loved the old man who has never wronged me, but his eyes were like that of the vulture” (Poe 666–69). The eyes are compared to the vulture signifying how enormous they were by using similes and vivid descriptions. The eyes were compared to evilness and hatred without due action by the old man. Therefore, the eyes in Poe’s stories suggests an ego gone evil by inducing similes and metaphors in the story to lay emphasis and mirror to the readers the outward appearance of the old man.
Every moment the narrator attempts to justify his sanity, it is questioned by confessions of absurd morality. This is illustrated by rational thinking by the very words he says when he sees the old man; “I love the old man, and he has never wronged me, but his eyes are so big, and I couldn’t stand them” (Poe 667). Poe portrays rationality and calmness in the murder making it more disturbing than the substantive moments of jitters by invoking themes of self-solitude and gothic. It mirrors the suspense of how someone justifies an act of brutality with mental stability and calmness. How the narrator demonstrates sanity at this point is alluding to what Poe has mirrored to the audience. It brings the rhetorical questions that illustrates the narrative’s thesis.
Last but not least, the author challenges the speed of time by initiating the police on the narrator’s murder. In such cases, the narrator represents calmness and more confusion towards the readers, which illustrates absurdity in a moment of low times. The mind acts against itself as paranoia leads to delusions and suspicions (“LitCharts”). The literal devices intensifies the readers’ urge to believe that his calmness is not normal after a barbaric action of murder. Moreover, it seems the suspicion catches up with him since his psychological imbalance castigates his acts rather than defending them. Allan Poe uses gothic styles to exemplify the real intent of the gaping eyes and what led to the narrator’s killing spree.
In conclusion, Allan Poe affirms to the readers that in narrative play, there are literal devices and gothic styles that make stories appealing and climactic. Symbolism, irony, and metaphors gives the tale an interpretive claim of what a scintillating Poe’s stories are about. They mirror every aspect of several themes such as rivalry, murder, and morality with vivid rhetorical analysis of the narrator, who tries to communicate sense to the readers by justifying his sanity in a brutal act. It is a play that is unique in its way.
Works Cited
“LitCharts.” LitCharts, https://www.litcharts.com/lit/poe-s-stories/the-tell-tale-heart. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart. SAGA Egmont, 2020.
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