Imagery In The Tell Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe was a very misunderstood writer of the 1800’s. Born January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe was famous for his dark short-stories and poems of horror and mystery. What made Poe such a controversial author, though, was his death that was just as mysterious and controversial as something he would write. Many believed that alcoholism was the source of his death while others had many different opinions such as the likes of carbon monoxide poisoning, epilepsy, or even rabies. The fact that this man was so mysterious is what made so many people enamored in his work to this day. One of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Was just about as strange and demising as the person that wrote it itself. The story starts with the unnamed narrator telling the reader that he is nervous but he isn’t mad. He then goes on to defend his sanity but in the process confesses that he killed an old man. Going on with his confession, the narrator tells the reader that it wasn’t for money or in spite of the old man that he performed such an act, his motive for murdering the old man was, “His eye! Yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture –a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold.” The man goes on to say that he killed the old man to rid of the eye that made him so unnerved. Though he went as far as killing the old man, the narrator insists time and time again that he is not crazy because his criminal actions were of a calm demeanor, not like those of a madman. The murderer then tells the story of how he killed the man, explaining that every night, at around midnight, he would open the old man’s door very slightly until he could peek his head in to study the eye. On the eighth night, the narrator continues to go on with his nightly routine, but something was different this time. As the narrator slightly puts his head into the cracked doorway his thumb slipped upon tin fastening and the old man sprang up in bed, in terror, crying out “Who’s there?” The narrator then stands still for an hour until he starts to hear a loud thumping sound, which he presumes to be the old man’s heartbeat. As the sound grew louder and louder the narrator started to become increasingly nervous and fearful that the sound of the man’s heartbeat would be heard by the likes of the neighbor. As his anxiety arose, the narrator decided to act on his fear of the neighbor hearing the thumping by killing the old man. After murdering the old man the narrator goes on to carefully dismember the corpse, cutting it …show more content…
A large part of the story is how the narrator 's mind is on such an unstable emotional state that he creates a setting in which the old man can’t feel safe in the own privacy of his home and especially his bedroom. The narrator 's mind feels as if it is being controlled by the old man’s vulture-like eye which causes the mind to become anxious and want to spy on the old man. This one characteristic that the old man has is what causes the narrator to essentially lose his mind, causing him to invade the old man’s privacy and in the end, kill the old man because the mind of the narrator cannot take the thumping that it is interpreting to be the old man’s …show more content…
It is the whole reason that the narrator murders this harmless old man. The narrator even reveals that he cares for the old man but he cannot get over the fact that the old man has an eye of a vulture. The eye also is so much into the narrator 's mind that it “Chills the very marrow in (his) bones,” meaning that the eye essentially creeps the narrator out so much that he is scared of it to the point of it being a bone-chilling fear. The eye of the old man is so much in the narrator’s mind that he feels so intimidated of it to the point that he feels he has to murder the old man just to get away from the eye for