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Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ published in 1843, explores the psychological paranoia which facilitates the psychoanalytical journey of a madman. The grotesque deviation of the murderer’s seemingly sane mindset dramatizes the equivocation which, instead of its attempts to separate from madness, rather highlights it. The wide range of imagery and sensory descriptions used within Poe’s story illuminates the light on the ambiguity that catalyzes the gothic story. One of them is the ‘vulture eye’, which I’m going to analyze below.
Poe gives one of the strongest samples of the capacity of the human mind to deceive itself and then to form conjectures on the nature of its own destruction. The protagonist sees the old man’s eye as blue with a ‘film’ or ‘veil’, symbolizing the character’s issues with their ‘inner vision’, trapped behind the veil. The pun of “eye” and the narrator’s own subjective character of experience “I” furthers the nuance of shallowness, killing on the accord of a “hard blue eye”. The reader’s understanding of the story is likewise filtered through the “veil[ed]” eye, creating ambiguity and mystery within the text, just like the dark “room” where the murder took place. Poe’s narrator did not kill the old man for cynical financial gain (“For his gold I had no desire”), nor did the old man “wrong” him, instead the narrator finds no purpose in killing the man besides to get rid of the vulture eye. Even his proffered motive, the old man’s “evil eye”, is weak, unconvincing even for the murderer himself (“I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!”). The imagery and inclusion of the old man’s eye creates and amplifies the meaning of the alibi for the murder, and how insane it truly was to kill over something so unimportant. The narrator feels prey to the vulture eye, on a psychoanalytical reading, he is faced with his own Ego which he hates so much he attempts to close the eye in that he can see who he really is, a man hideous from the inside.
Poe conveyed the notion of torment by the guilty conscious in the short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ in which the capacity of the human mind can cause self-destruction. Poe’s implication provides a study of paranoia and mental deterioration. The mental disorientation creates a jerky syntax which is dramatized by the imagery of the ‘vulture eye’. The nuance of ambiguity throughout ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ allows multiple interpretations of the text as well as showcasing the complexity of the human brain.
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