The primary message author Edgar Allen Poe tries to communicate through "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that the human heart knows the truth and will always have a louder voice than the lies that are told to obscure it. This is demonstrated through the narrator's hallucination of his victim's heart beating loudly through the floorboards. Despite the fact that the narrator dismembered his victim, his guilt and madness drives his delusion that somehow the old man's...
The primary message author Edgar Allen Poe tries to communicate through "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that the human heart knows the truth and will always have a louder voice than the lies that are told to obscure it. This is demonstrated through the narrator's hallucination of his victim's heart beating loudly through the floorboards. Despite the fact that the narrator dismembered his victim, his guilt and madness drives his delusion that somehow the old man's heart is still beating and that it will soon announce his crime to the world. This can be seen as a metaphor for the narrator's own conscience, which ultimately results in his confession to the police.
Another strong message delivered through the text is the unreliability of human perspective. The narrator is so deeply entrenched in his delusional perspective that he confesses to murder in order to prove his sanity. He fails to recognize the possibility that his madness is what motivated his crime in the first place. The narrator's fervent belief in his victim's "evil eye" was enough to move him to murder, despite claiming to love the old man. He also reports hearing "many things in heaven and hell," which further illustrate's Poe's message that it is entirely possible for someone to create a nightmare through his or her own warped perspective when there is no objective reality behind it. In this sense, much of human suffering begins and ends in the mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment