The Tell-Tale Heart. Literature & Language Assignment

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May 21, 2020
The Tell-tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart" uses published in 1843 shows an unnamed narrator’s descent to madness after murdering an old man by using stunning imagery by making use of acute senses.
The narrator is first shown cold and calculating from the get-go, but cracks start to form more and more as the story moves forward, ending with his manic desperation in his pleas for sanity. He takes pride in his killing of an innocent man, with his primary, and only, motive for killing was simply because the old man had a “vulture-eye”. He then proceeds to describe how he murdered him and how he managed to successfully hide his dead body.
The narrator, being an “unreliable narrator”, and even if we already know that he killed the old man, he still insists on his own innocence and sanity. To whom he pleads to? To a warden, perhaps? Or a policeman? Or a relative? It remains unanswered by the end of the story.
There are multiple symbols in the story, but of course the driving force of the tale lies in the strength of the symbols of the heart and the eye, two very unrelated parts of the body, but have been since time immemorial, symbols of the morals of man.
The eye is symbolic of the narrator’s inability to see what is in front of him and confront what he has done. W...