In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", we do see a
variety of dark themes as are par for the course with Poe, but in particular we see
guilt and the question of
sanity.
Our narrator has this strange
capacity throughout the text to hear a heartbeat. This seems to haunt him, but a greater
label for the repeated disturbance would be guilt. Having killed someone close to him,
he tells on himself but it is hard to identify what occurs as remorse, a feeling we
would expect for such a crime so we have to turn to
insanity.
My students often get lost in this piece
wondering what different things mean or represent, but Poe is one of the most difficult
authors to understand in terms of what might have been going on in his head. The
narrator gives argument after argument to prove his sanity, but we audience members see
these efforts as evidence of the insane because each one claims something normal persons
just would not do.
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