LEYTE NORMAL UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL
TACLOBAN CITY

______________________________________________________________

A PARTIAL REQUIREMENT IN LIT 502

(MAJOR ANGLO-AMERICAN WRITERS)

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SUBMITTED BY:

CHARMAINE B. BRAMIDA

M.E. Student

SUBMITTED TO:

DR. GERARDO P. NICOL

Professor

March 2019
 THE\ MADMAN:
A LITERARY ANALYSIS
Introduction
This paper examines one of Poe’s most famous short stories, The Tell-Tale Heart, through a
psychoanalytical literary lens. This analysis also discusses its gothic elements, imagery, and
other devices, which ultimately try to give the readers a unique perspective of the most
important element in the story; the narrator.
Like some of Poe’s work such as The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale
Heart is a bleak and dark exposition of an unknown character’s successful attempt at murder
and their eventual delirious confession from the torment of guilt. The story-teller’s motiveless
actions rouse one’s curiosity of their sanity as well as their relationship with the old man. It
attempts to further enlighten readers of certain mental illnesses characterized by the unnamed
narrator. Some parts of this paper will also give a comparative account of his other structurally
parallel gothic work, The Black Cat with The Tell-Tale Heart to highlight important points of
the latter.

Biography of the Writer

Edgar Allan Poe lived quite a difficult life. Born to parents who died shortly after he was born,
he was taken under the care of the Allan’s who initially were good foster parents until tension
grew due to financial problems concerning Edgar’s gambling habits. Aside from gambling, he
had a drinking problem that mostly caused his dismissals from the institutions he attended
(Giordano, 2005) as well as his short stint in the military. These problems worsened his already
sour relations with the Allan’s, especially John. He was considerably a problematic young
adult. Later, he married his cousin Virginia and tried to make a living writing for a local paper.
At first, his works did not gain much attention until The Raven. He was promoted to editor, yet
he never earned enough to live comfortably. Poe had to endure another loss when his wife died
of tuberculosis. Evidently, Poe suffered from depression and paranoia because of these ordeals.
He died at the early age of 40. Days before his death, he was allegedly found unconscious
somewhere in Baltimore, Maryland (Bandy, 1978). The following letter from W.T. Bandy’s
“Dr. Moran and the Poe-Reynolds Myth” attests to the allegation:

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849

Dear Sir: —

There is a gentleman rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s Fourth Ward polls,
who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great
distress. He says that he is acquainted with you, and I assure you he is in need
of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,
Jos. W. Walker

To Dr. J. E. Snodgrass
A lot of people had different contentions as to the cause of his death: from suicide attempt, to
election violence, to alcoholism. Yet to this day, it remains a mystery.
Poe’s oeuvre has a predominantly gothic theme with images of murderers and madmen. Most
critics credit Poe’s inclination to the genre as pathological due to his dark and ill-fated personal
history (Mambrol, 2017). One can definitely assume that his stories stem from his own life
which perhaps will help readers substantially understand the nature of his works.

The Plot
The introduction is reminiscent of the structure of Poe’s other popular work, The Black Cat. It
begins with a seemingly disturbed narrator and a renunciation of his/her own madness.
“…I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a
case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and
very surely do I not dream.” — The Black Cat
“TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why
will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not
destroyed—not dulled them.” — The Tell-Tale Heart

Ironically, what follows is a sinister account of the homicide, reflecting the story line of TBC.
The narrator reveals that he murdered an old man because of his “evil blue eye”. The narrator
goes into detail about how the crime was committed. Carefully biding time, the narrator visits
the old man’s apartment every midnight and observes him sleeping in the dark. In the mornings,
the narrator behaves as if everything was normal; the narrator is even kinder towards him.
After a week of these late-night visits, the narrator resolves to finally do the deed. On the eighth
night, the narrator arrives at the old man’s apartment. The narrator carefully opens the door to
his room yet slips, causing the old man to wake up and cry out. The narrator stays still waiting
for the old man to lie down again, but neither of them moves.
Suddenly, the narrator hears a pounding coming from the old man’s terrified heart. The narrator
feels empathy towards him thinking of experiencing similar terrifying nights. Believing that he
senses a foreign presence in the room and is not going to go back to sleep anytime soon, the
narrator decides to shed a little light with the lantern to better see the old man’s disposition.
As if fate willed it, the light shines directly into the old man’s “evil eye”. The narrator stands
there with such stillness, staring at the old man’s pale, blue eye while hearing the cadence of
the old man’s pounding chest.
Hearing this while looking at his eye—the source of the narrator’s contempt—drives the
narrator over the edge. Jumping towards the old man, the narrator smothers him with his bed,
dismembers his body, and hides them under the floorboards of the room, clearing out any signs
of the murder, like what the narrator had done with his victim in The Black Cat—burying them
somewhere in the house.
Regardless, the police are tipped by the neighbors due to the old man’s screaming earlier. They
arrive at the apartment, but the narrator tells them the screams were the narrator’s own. Without
any trace of being alarmed, the narrator invites them to sit directly above the floorboards
concealing the dismembered body of the old man. The policemen suspect nothing for the
narrator seems unbothered and at ease.
The narrator suddenly hears the same sound again—the pounding of the old man’s heartbeat.
The police do not notice it, but the narrator has grown delirious over the violent beating.
Paranoia takes over the narrator feeling that the policemen hear what he hears and already know
what happened. The narrator is overcome with guilt and confesses to them pointing towards
the floorboards.
The ending mirrors The Black Cat’s but in a different manner—both concludes with the
psychological breakdown of the narrators. However, in The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator
confesses due to paranoia and overwhelming guilt. While the indicted in The Black Cat was
caught by the police through their own discovery of the body.
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the
planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart! —The Tell-Tale
Heart
“In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The
corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the
eyes of the spectators…. I had walled the monster up within the tomb! —The
Black Cat

Characterization: The Narrator

Unreliable. First-person point of view almost always favors the feelings and emotions of the
characters, and they may not always say the truth in the story. Therefore, the readers should
not easily trust and believe the narrator in this account, especially since they are trying to attest
to their innocence from evil deeds but presents questionable and foolish arguments.
Perverted. The narrator proves their perverseness (also a recurring theme in Poe’s The Black
Cat) when they said, “Object there was none. Passion there was none…. I loved the old man.
He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire.” The
narrator essentially murdered a man they admittedly loved; one who has never done anything
to them, but with the weakest and most seemingly irrational motive—the old man’s blue eye.
Genderless. Additionally, the narrator’s gender is not revealed. There are no pronouns used
for the narrator mainly because the story is told in the first-person point of view. However, it
is interesting that most people acknowledge or assume that it is a male. Yet, some critics think
the narrator is a female caring for the old man. According to Gita Rajan, “Within this
framework, the narrator in Poe's tale can be posited as a female rather than a male who desires
power. She stalks the old man and father figure for "seven long nights" and kills him in an
attempt to escape the surveillance of his ‘evil eye’…. The old man’s disturbing stare upsets the
narrator who decides on an impulse to kill him….”
Ambiguous. The ambiguity of the narrator’s gender extends to his or her true nature. The
narrator tells the invisible audience that he or she is sane but confesses to murdering someone
they admittedly loved because of a disturbing eye. Also, the narrator felt empathy towards the
old man when he woke up from sleep crying and sobbing because of an unseen terror, and yet
it amused the narrator. The narrator shares, “I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him,
although I chuckled at heart.”
Mentally Disturbed. The narrator shows signs of condensation, which is one of the methods
by which the repressed returns in hidden ways. For example, in dreams multiple dream-
thoughts are often combined and amalgamated into a single element of the manifest dream
(Siegel, K.), which could be the old man’s “evil eye”. This could be evident through the
following lines: “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.”
Obsessed. The narrator’s psychological instability is further concretized by the way they acted
prior to the murder. The narrator had become obsessed with the old man, stalking him every
night, which was something the narrator ostensibly enjoyed and is evident in these lines, “I
could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little
by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts.”
These feelings of the narrator only verify their insanity and perverseness. The narrator enjoys
what they are doing. One would beg to ask the narrator, why go to such a stretch before killing
the old man? Why not kill the old man during the first night? The narrator reveals that the
painstaking steps they go through every night allows them to feel power: “Never before that
night had I felt the extent of my own powers—of my sagacity.”
Diseased. Still trying to defend their sanity, the narrator explains that they mistake their “over-
acuteness of the senses” as madness when they tell the audience that they could hear the beating
of the old man’s heart. There is a medical condition called “hyperesthesia” which is a condition
that involves an abnormal increase in sensitivity to stimuli of the sense. (Noordenbos, W.,
1959). This could very well be the affliction of the narrator, but it doesn’t justify the narrator’s
ridiculous contempt for the old man’s blue eye as reason enough to murder him.
Furthermore, the eerie calm and composed reaction of the narrator when the police questioned
them is suggestive of psychological uncertainty. Normally, when one commits a murder and
the police questions them, they should feel nervous and uneasy. Yet, these were not the case
when the narrator is interrogated by the police.
The old man. Not much is to be said about the old man. No backstory has been told by the
narrator. His relationship with the narrator is only implied through the narrator’s opinion of
him.

Biographical Connection
Considering the biographical background of the writer, the narrator could very well be a
representation of one of Poe’s repressed emotions. The old man could be a characterization of
his foster father, John Allan, with whom he had a poor relationship with growing up. This could
be a displacement of Poe’s resentment towards him.
Atmosphere

Gothic. As was mentioned, Poe has an evident inclination towards the gothic genre. The Tell-
Tale Heart manifests this throughout the story. Its atmosphere is dark and unnerving; there is
nothing happy nor optimistic about the environment. The setting takes place in an apartment
singularly occupied by the old man, where the narrator comes every midnight. Not much is
said about the physical setting, but Poe used the narrator’s actions to convey dreary and
ominous feelings throughout the text. The mysterious identity of the characters, especially the
narrator, adds to the tension. There is also a sense of foreboding of the supernatural through
the narrator’s fear of the “evil eye”.
Symbolism
The eye is mostly a common symbol of power, representing insight and enlightenment. Carl
Jung (1959) quotes it as “the prototype of the mandala (Hinduism’s symbol of the universe)”.
However, such is not the case for the old man’s blue eye. His eye is established as the story’s
main symbol. But instead of it being a sign of the aforementioned, the eye is the center of the
narrator’s fear and paranoia, so much so that the character calls it the “Evil”. Perhaps it is
because of the “film” (which might be responsible for its blue color), implying something
wrong about it causing the character to feel such hostility. The narrator has become so obsessed
about it that he (or she) has attributed qualities to it that may not be accurate or factual. Still,
there are no evidence proving that the eye is malevolent other than the undependable statements
of the character.

Irony and Tone

The beginning of the story strongly displays verbal irony. The narrator’s statements are self-
indicting and speaks against their own purpose of convincing the readers of their sanity. Even
though the narrator insists it, they go on to destroy any point of proving their sanity.
Additionally, the first-person point of view makes for a good dramatic irony for both the
audience and the old man. It also implies the unreliableness of the narrator heightening the
suspense of the events.
Set is an array of dramatic tones throughout the build-up of the story. The narrator’s exposition
jumps from one tone to the next making the narration excitable keeping readers on edge. One
moment the narrator sounds anxious, then afraid and terrified, to thrilled, to menacing and
arrogant. Structure also adds more to it; the slow pace of the narrator’s telling of the story
parallels the way the murder was committed—tiptoeing towards the climax. It keeps the readers
anticipating when the narrator is actual going to make the kill.
Generally, the narrator sounds mad, obsessive, and paranoid—clearly in need of help. One
could almost feel sorry for the narrator’s plagued disposition.
Imagery
Poe uses a lot of auditory imagery in the story. This clearly makes more sense than using visual
imagery as the events take place in the darkness and silence of the night. Hence, sound provides
the readers a more effective sensory experience. Also, the character exhibits extreme sensitivity
to it, and as the story is written in the first-person point of view, it is only sensible to use
auditory imagery as a literary device. He proves this outrightly in the first sentences of the
story:
“The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.
Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven
and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.”
Throughout the selection, we hear the images—words provoking one’s sense of hearing such
as “creaked,” “groan,” “chuckled,” “crying out,” “chirp,” “low, stifled sound,” “dreadful
echo, —as the narrator tells us the story.
The most notable use of the device happens in the climax, towards the denouement and the
resolution where the narrator hears the beating of the old man’s terrified heart. The first time
the narrator hears it is when the old man is awakened. This triggers the narrator towards
murder.:
“—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a
watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was
the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of
a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”
The next time the narrator hears the beating is after the dreadful deed. Ironically, the beating
sound becomes the reason for the narrator’s undoing. When the narrator is confronted by the
police, the calm boldness the narrator parades crumbles as the sound is heard again, without
doubt, through his (or her) distorted imagination—who in their right mind can still hear a
heartbeat from a dead man?

Conclusion
The story is a straightforward murder confession, even though it doesn’t seem so. The narrator
is consumed by delusion and so much of the narrator’s reaction only proves projection—a
psychological defense mechanism where the human ego protects itself against unconscious
impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves
while attributing them to others (Siegel, K.).
The heartbeat does not come from below the floorboards. The sound is from the narrator’s own
chest—the loud beating is (or her) gnawing, unconscious guilt, which materializes as paranoia.
This must be the affliction that the character exhibits, possibly an unfortunate effect of the
narrator’s hyperesthesia, which still does not explain or justify the narrator’s obsessive hate for
the old man’s blue eye.
The narrator’s insistence on the heartbeat coming from the dismembered body of the old man,
i.e. projection, only indicates his (or her) madness—a madman does not recognize the feeling
of guilt. Hence, the title “The Tell-Tale Heart”—the unconscious betrayal of oneself.
References
Bandy, William T. (1987). "Dr. Moran and the Poe-Reynolds Myth", Myths and Reality:
The Mysterious Mr. Poe. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

C.G. Jung. (1959). Mandala Symbolism. Bollingen Press. [on line] jungcurrents.com.
Available at: http://jungcurrents.com/jung-eye-mandala-prototype

Giordano, Robert. (June 27, 2005). "A short biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)."
Retrieved from: http://www.poestories.com/biography.php

Mamborl, Nasrullah. (November 30, 2017). “Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe”.
Retrieved from: https://literariness.org/2017/11/30/literary-criticism-of-edgar-allan-poe/

Noordenbos, W. (1959). PAIN Problems pertaining to the transmission of nerve impulses

which give rise to pain. Amsterdam : Elsevier

Rajan, G. (2002). “A Feminist Rereading of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” [pdf file] Retrieved
from: http://blogs.setonhill.edu/taydornin/files/2014/10/7728800.pdf

Siegel, K. Introduction to Modern Literary Theory. [on line] Kristisiegel.com. Available at:
http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm#psycho [Accessed 13 May 2019].