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The Closeness of Love and Hate
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe explores how someone can hurt someone they purport to love. The murder of the old man predicates on the narrator’s inability to separate what he loves from what he hates—the old man from his eye. With his nighttime vigils, the narrator attempts to create a scenario where he cannot be reminded of the old man and focus only on the eye. However, this love can only stifle the narrator’s hatred for so long. Once he can no longer see the old man, the narrator becomes merciless. Interestingly, despite the way he describes his feelings about the old man and the eye as separate, in murder he treats the old man’s eye as inseparable from the old man. He does not try to cut out the eye, but instead, he attacks the old man’s whole body by smothering him. He uses the old man’s heartbeat as a metric of whether the old man is alive or dead, not the eye being closed. Thus, despite his protestations of separation, he ultimately treats the old man as someone he both loves and is repulsed by. In the end, his revulsion wins.
The Internal Nature of Madness
Poe uses the narrator’s voice to examine an imagined psychological portrait of a madman. Throughout the story, the narrator posits a definition of madness that he uses to proclaim his sanity. In his mind, insanity is something evident. He suggests an insane person is incapable of patience, method, and guile. However, the narrator’s madness stems not from his outward behavior, but his beliefs and interpretations of the world around him. His root belief, in the evilness of the eye, that it has a malevolence separate from the old man himself, is not rational. Madness here comes from responding to things that are untrue, whether believed or perceived. Although the narrator insists that the enhanced perception he feels is a sign of his sanity, the events of the story suggest that over-perception or overthinking may instead lead to irrational thought. Indeed, the narrator’s fear of the old man appears to come from him reading too much into his discomfort surrounding the appearance of the old man’s eye, that is, feeling too much about it. The intensity of his guilt when confronted with the police drives him to behave irrationally, mistaking the sound of his own heartbeat (or a hallucinated heartbeat) for the old man’s.
The Power of Unconscious Guilt
Guilt in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is an irresistible internal force that can override reason and self-preservation, almost a form of madness in itself. One of the more shocking elements of the story is the way the narrator, despite seeming proud of his crime, apparently feels so much guilt as to hallucinate the old man’s heartbeat. If not for the narrator’s confession he likely could have gotten away with the old man’s murder, so carefully did he plan and manipulate those around him. His behavior with the police suggests that he doesn’t expect himself to feel guilty for his crime, seeing how he leads them to the old man’s room for a chat. And yet, from the moment the narrator begins imagining the sound he hears is the old man’s heart, it becomes clear that his lack of remorse is yet another façade, like the charm he showed to the old man and the police. The narrator can take every single precaution he can not to alert anyone else to his crime, but he himself knows what he did, and he cannot suppress his own reaction to this horrible knowledge.
