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¶ … Tell-Tale Heart
As the class notes say, "Romanticism or Romantic movement is predominantly pre-occupied with Imagination -- an escape from the world of reality/pain. Poe's story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," ignores Romantic styles of fiction popular during his day.
Instead, Poe leaves romantic literary notions of escape behind and instead leads us into a Gothic trap from which there will be no escape -- the tortured mind of someone driven by madness to commit a murder. Since the story takes place entirely within the narrator's mind, we experience the mental anguish of the murderer as he becomes more and more overwhelmed by the setting -- his maddened brain. Just as the narrator has no escape from his dark fate, the reader is given no pretense that the story will resolve in anything but in dark and horrible actions.
The narrator of the story senses that he is trapped within his own mind, and tries to present...
He tells the reader that the disease has sharpened his senses. As he tells his story, he draws us into a dark and melodramatic world viewed through the lens of his madness, and keeps us there with gothic images of an evil eye and a plot whose twists are interpreted through the narrator's distorted perceptions. This drawing inward instead of reaching out is one thing demonstrating the gothic nature of the story. A romantic story would have reached outward and offered some release from the building tension. Poe's gothic handling of this story, however, is unrelenting. We have entered a world of terror, and there is no way to escape.
Viewing himself as not mad but gifted, the narrator determines that the old man's "evil eye" must be destroyed. Believing he is being quite clever, he says, "With what foresight, with what dissimulation, I went to work!" He keeps his…
The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear his heart beginning to pound. He believes it to be the heart of the old man hidden under the floorboards, and he believes that everyone can hear it. His fractured mind has revealed his crime in spite of his best efforts. His heart has told the tale.
The narrator might want to romantically "fade far away," "dissolve" and "quite forget" the old man's eye (class notes), but instead, we are relentlessly drawn into a gothic nightmare. There is no chance for him to escape from his tortured reality. He is compulsively drawn to look at the old man, and then compulsively drawn to stare at the terrifying pale blue eye, and then obsessively focused on the sound of his own pounding, tell-tale heart.
Pritchard, Hollie. 2003. "Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart.'" The Explicator, March 22.
Edgar Allen Poe's 1843 short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" is about a young man who becomes mortally obsessed with an old man's creepy eye and ultimately kills him. Thomas Hardy's 1902 poem "The Man He Killed" is about a soldier who has become used to killing people just because they are on the other side of the war. Both of these narratives lend insight into guilt related to death, told
Tell-Tale Heart The narrator of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" intentionally mystifies the reader by demanding respect for his narratorial authority while constantly calling his own judgment and sensory perceptions into question. The effect is to create a sense of suspicion surrounding the narrator which is confirmed not when he murders the old man, but when he reveals the madness which causes him to hear the old man's
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Edgar Allan Poe's the Tell-Tale Heart Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, may be the best example of gothic fiction ever written. In it, Poe uses every aspect of story-telling to help contribute to the atmospheric intensity of the story. This utilization of every aspect of the storytelling process results in a gothic feeling that permeates every detail in the story. When the story opens, one realizes that Poe's
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..it is sadomasochism made acceptable to a mass readership by the elimination of any ostensible sexual element. Imbedded in the tale is the psychological journey of an egocentric who derives pleasure from cruelty."(Pritchard, 148) While this explanation stands, it must be observed that Poe's intention went beyond the psychological investigation: his description of evil doing is almost always accompanied by a certain symbolism that alludes to the intrusion of the