Symbolism In A Tell Tale Heart

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“A Tell Tale Heart”

In “A Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, the author describes a man’s insanity after committing murder. He illustrates the sequence of events leading up to the crime and begins the story with the ending first to portray the narrator’s repeating, circulating thoughts in his mind that are a hint at his underlying guiltiness. The author utilizes symbolism as a way to show the stages of the narrator’s ascension into lunacy and inevitable insanity after killing the old man. After an initial introduction in which the narrator pleads his sanity, the reader is introduced to the story’s first example of symbolism which is the old man’s eye. The narrator’s inherent fixation on this has caused him to reduce the identity of the
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He decides when it dies, and when the old man’s hearts stops beating. The beating of the heart is an important element throughout the story that quantifies time for the narrator being that it is like a metronome. There are two points in the story which illustrate the importance of the heart beating because it is introduced at key points in the passage. The first instance the reader sees it is moments before the man’s death when he is aware the narrator in his presence. The beating heart serves as a ticking time bomb to the eye’s death. It causes the narrator’s sense of hearing to become “more powerful” because it is not only counting down to the death of the man, but the narrator as well who hears the beating, “like the sound of a clock heard through a wall,” (Poe 68.) Right after the narrator hears the heart beating, he attacks the man forcing the ticking to stop, or so he thought. The second instance the reader hears the beating heart is after the death of the man when the police are sitting in the bedroom. Each tick is a countdown into a deeper insanity, his confession, and also serves as a way for the narrator to reflect upon his own humanity. Up until this point, his actions have been animal-like and barbaric, so when he hears the heart beating after the murder, he is essentially hearing his own heartbeat. This brings a more humanlike feeling of emotion into the story because each tick of the heart is a reminder of what he did to the old man. The inherent guilt and paranoia begin to emerge with the passage of time as seen when the narrator can hear the heartbeat “louder, louder” and is convinced the police could hear it too

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