Herrera Diaz 1
Lisetty Diaz
English 1102
Fiction Essay
September 10, 2018
“The Tell-Tale Heart” Symbolism Analyze
"The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe is a famous American piece of Literature that is world well known. This short story is about a man that eventually becomes out of his right mind while taking care of an old man. The narrator begins to become furious and eventually build a plot to kill the old man in his bedroom. Poe in this story uses symbolism explicitly to give it a more noticeable effect and add to the anger the narrator portrays. Poe uses three main symbolisms that contribute significantly to "The Tell-Tale Heart": the old man's blue eye with a film over that remarkably bothered him, a watch that for the most part represented the old man's beating heart, the bed and the bedroom mainly serving as something you should be frightened of.
Poe never had a problem with this old man, but somehow his eye bothered him to the point that Poe decided to end this old man's life. The old man's blue eyes had a "film over it” (2); it could have been merely a medical condition. Symbolically the character had issues on how the old man viewed the outer world. As the narrator mentions, the eye does some unusual stuff. The author chose the old man’s eye as a specific symbol in this gothic story to represent the inability of the narrator to hide his sin. The eye also represents the way into the soul of the narrator. The blue eyes of the old man contribute to the overall theme of this story because the narrator is petrified that someone will see into his deepest fears and violent thoughts.
The narrator mentions a watch several times in the story. A watch of course represents time, and it is said to be watching death in the distance. In the eighth night of the character trying to kill the man, he compares himself to a watch. Like it was mentioned before the narrator is representing time as an agent of death. The narrator is controlling the old man’s time of death implying he is a death watch. The watch also serves as the old man's heart. After he was done killing the old man the author mentions "It was a low, dull, quick sound much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton" (10). The narrator probably imagined this sound as part of being guilty, or the officers that came by his house probably had a watch in their pocket. The symbol...
