Originally printed in 1843, in James Russell Lowell's, The Pioneer, "The Tell-Tale Heart" is one of Poe's most well known pieces of work. This piece of work is seen by many as both a thriller and a horror story at the same time. At the time many critiques were hung up on Poe's dark, somewhat twisted stories, but now he is recognized for showing the power words can have on a reader to make them think. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" Poe's narrator begins by explain the murder he committed of an old man that did seemingly has done nothing to the narrator to deserve being killed, except that the narrator did not like the look of the old man's eyes. Poe puts the reader inside the head of the mad man, which is why the story can be very confusing and almost erratic if you do not understand where it is coming from, inside the head of a mad man. In this section from the short story, Poe really allows the reader to see the sickness in the protagonists head as he describes walking into the room to kill the old man.
"Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself --"It is nothing but the wind in the chimney --it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel --although he neither saw nor heard --to feel the presence of my head within the room."(Poe)
Being able to project that type of evil into a literary work is an extreme powerful skill that not many posses. Many thought he was crazy after reading this thinking how could someone be able to write about such a sick mind in such detail, but that is why people loved it, it forced them to think like a crazy murderer and decipher the narrators thoughts and action because he is obviously a pretty unreliable narrator.
The Tell-Tale Heart
No comments:
Post a Comment