Blog 12: Initial pre-writing

The Tell-Tale Heart

The short story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, is a short horror story first published in January of 1983. This short story is one of the most familair stories I have read from Edgar Allan Poe's collection of short horror stories since middle school. From start to finish I find that it is chilling and disturbing how the story unfolds from sanity to the insanity of the narrator's mind. For my analysis and interpertation of the story I will use the Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism to further explain the events, thoughts, and the possibilites of interpreting the narrator's mind. With that said, the story is narrated by the unreliable narrator (himself), who explains the events of how he carefully calculates the murder of the old man who possess an evil eye he calls " The Vulture Eye".

According to the narrator himself, he claims in the beginning that he is very nervous but not mad because if he were he would be unable to tell his story to us (the audience). The narrator waits silenty like a shadow as the old man sleeps looking for an open opportunity to murder him but ultimately his eye. After the murder he disposes of the body by dismembering the corpse and hiding it underneath a wooden plank. He feels that all is well and solved but his confidence dissipates as the policemen come for an inspection after their long stay at the narrator's house. The narrator switches from his confidence and then becomes paranoid because he hears the sound of a beating heart. The noise haunts him as the sound gets louder and louder until he is no longer able to contain his guilt and at last confesses to the policemen by revealing all that has really happened and that he was actually the murderer.

One of the main symbols appearing in this story is the "Vulture Eye", the narrator explains how it deeply disturbs him as he gazes upon it and that it is a sight that makes his blood run cold. According to a website enotes.com, the vulture eye symbolizes the coming of death. The vulture is a huge flying bird and is the predator circling around a sickly animal or person waiting until it dies so that it can consume the corpse. Therefore, the Old Man was nearing death as he was soon to fall victim before the narrator. Many other symbols appearing in the story are shadow, death, corpse, and heart. In Shadow Psychology from wikipedia, the shadow is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings,and instincts. This in general can explain the person's most personal and inner feelings and our strong feelings usually cannot be openly expressed, however in the dream world, all feelings and strong desires can be fulfilled and expressed beyond the ordinary limits in the real world. One of the most well known psychologists, Carl Jung, notes that "the shadow sometimes overwhelms a person's actions; for example, when the conscious mind is shocked, confused, or paralyzed by indecision". When the narrator found the Old Man's eye open as he slept he all of a sudden lept and suffocated him to death.

In the analysis of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticsm, this literary approach is how critics interpret literature as dreams.The text in literature is actually hiding its true content or desires, therefore in dreams they can be expressed as some sort of outloet to lessen the actual reality that occurs in the real world itself. From the wikipedia in the article Unconscious Mind, "While past thoughts and memories may be deleted from immediate consciousness, they direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious". This quote may be able to explain the narrator's unconscious feelings towards the old man himself because he was driven to the limit of going mad that because of the old man's eye he had decided that he should be put to death.


Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_criticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tell-Tale_Heart
http://www.enotes.com/tell-tale-heart/q-and-a/what-might-vultures-eye-symbolize-59725