Poe’s speciality is to leave loose ends and dozens of interpretations, all of them intertwined in the topic of the double. Therefore, the tale is at first a nest of doubles.
The madman and the old man are at the centre of this horrible tale in which one is murdered by the other, and the most important aspect of their duality might be there, on the line of the madman’s retelling of the events, since one of the main aspects of Poe’s fiction is the one of the narrator’s unreliability. Should we trust this madman who describes himself as “nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous” from the beginning? To what extent is what he has told real? Could he have imagined the whole thing, both the murder and the old man?
Several incoherencies pave his tale and lead us in that direction. First of all, despite it being an intradiegetic tale, the madman seems to …show more content…
In a way, this tale is the physical representation of the uncanny. This German notion, defined by Freud in his eponymous essay, published in 1919, is used to designate what was hidden to all but eventually comes back to haunt. Here, the old man hidden under the floor for no one to see eventually comes back to haunt the madman through his heartbeat and leads him to confess his crime. At the same time, it emphasises the duality as it is what binds all the events together. We always tend to try and find a reason for irrational events, such as the heartbeat, the madman’s identity or the Evil Eye. In literary gothic, this is described as the “explained supernatural”, although it often comes within the story, when the author themselves provides us with a rational explanation for anything questionable that has happened. Here, we as readers are doing this job, and some of these readers sometimes take their speculations a step further by adapting it to another
The madman and the old man are at the centre of this horrible tale in which one is murdered by the other, and the most important aspect of their duality might be there, on the line of the madman’s retelling of the events, since one of the main aspects of Poe’s fiction is the one of the narrator’s unreliability. Should we trust this madman who describes himself as “nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous” from the beginning? To what extent is what he has told real? Could he have imagined the whole thing, both the murder and the old man?
Several incoherencies pave his tale and lead us in that direction. First of all, despite it being an intradiegetic tale, the madman seems to …show more content…
In a way, this tale is the physical representation of the uncanny. This German notion, defined by Freud in his eponymous essay, published in 1919, is used to designate what was hidden to all but eventually comes back to haunt. Here, the old man hidden under the floor for no one to see eventually comes back to haunt the madman through his heartbeat and leads him to confess his crime. At the same time, it emphasises the duality as it is what binds all the events together. We always tend to try and find a reason for irrational events, such as the heartbeat, the madman’s identity or the Evil Eye. In literary gothic, this is described as the “explained supernatural”, although it often comes within the story, when the author themselves provides us with a rational explanation for anything questionable that has happened. Here, we as readers are doing this job, and some of these readers sometimes take their speculations a step further by adapting it to another