Analyze the story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe.

Exemplifying Poe's signature style of
arabesque, "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a narrative of horror and psychological
torment in its many twists and turns and returns of narrative.  Interestingly, some critics
suggest that the old man is a doppelganger for the narrator, and the
narrator's loathing for the man represents his own self-hatred.  The narrator's obsession with
the old man's eye seems to indicate his self-hatred as he projects these vile feelings onto
something outside himself, a condition known as transference.

The
eye of the old-man is identified by the narrator as a curse upon him.  So, if he can rid himself
of the eye--for he tells the reader that he loved the old man, and when the man's eyes are
closed, he will not kill him--he will be all right.  Thus, Poe with his patterns of arabesque
"teases out the latent horror" of his image, a material image that forms an instance of a
deranged and perverse aethetic as the narrator shares the horror with 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....

It was open, wide, wide open, and I grew furious as I gazed
upon it.  I saw it with perfect distinctness--all ..with a hideous veil over it that chilled the
very marrow in my bones.

The
psychological changes in the narrator parallel the physical events. The death of the old man,
rather than ridding the narrator of a detestable object and relieving him, tortures the narrator
since he has killed his doppelganger and thus, effects his own ruination. 
This removal of the perverse aesthetic destroys the narrator and he confesses in his desperate
attempt to join with the old man in his self-hatred:

Oh
God! what could I do?...They were making a mockery of my horror!...I felt
that I must scream or die!