Allegory And Symbolism In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

The narrator cannot seem to grasp that the glossy and repulsive eye is an ego-evil symbol. Placing this eye in a category would be easy it would be put in a category of evil. This is because the eye has an ego-evil background. In the quote “… For it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (Poe 42). The “ego” can see the eye and it judges the eye subjectively, but the eye also has the power to look back and remove the ego. The narrator feels threatened by the eye because the eye notices his sin. In the text, it points out that Poe was blinded to his own sin. You can see this when you read the quote “… no human eye- not even his could have detected anything wrong” (Poe 44). The narrator refused to see any wrong in himself. This is

The narrator claims he was victimized by the old man with a tell-tale heart- a heart that refuses to die, and the heart wants to make sure that the murder will come to light. ““Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! - here, here! – it is the beating of his hideous heart!”” (Poe 45) The guilt started to tear apart the narrator inside, but why? At first the narrator had no fear of the eye. The only time the storyteller gained fear of this wretched eye was when he was going to kill the old man, and then after the murder was complete, the narrator’s fear of the eye grew stronger- or so he thought. “I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct—it continued and become more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling; but it continued and gained definitiveness—until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears” (Poe 44). This was the point in the story where it goes to show how the narrator has literally gone insane because he is starting to hear a ringing from the old man’s heart. Even though the narrator couldn’t see eye to eye with the old man, the one concept they did have in common was how they could see heart to heart. The narrator loved the old man before and even after he killed him. This is where his guilty conscience came into play and that’s where the “ringing” came from; it did not come from the dismembered old man’s body. The old man is insane and the horrific eye that seemed to stare deep into his soul while judging him was the narrator stepping outside of his body and the outside of his comfort zone and rightfully judging