A Hermeneutic of Poe’s Tell Tale Heart

I happened to read the story since I had to teach it to eight graders. The story belongs to the genre of the Gothic Vintage. The protagonist of the story becomes obsessed with the killing of an old man. The whole story revolves around his pathological mania for killing. The reason for killing is psycho-analytically revealed in the story. The old man has an eye that resembles that of a vulture. The evil eye is haunting the protagonist. The wealth or possessions of the man like Gold does not interest the protagonist. He visits the old man’s house several times in the night and goes through the ecstasy of the thought of butchery. And finally one night he accomplishes the mission. He decapitates the body and buries it in the wooden planks that make the floor of the house. Then Poe brings in the cops who come to house on the pretext of having heard a shriek. The protagonist at first manages to maintain his composure but in the end looses it and spills the beans to the cops that he has liquidated the old man. It’s true that Poe has been characterized as a mad genius and as a tormented artist. The protagonist is suffering from narcissistic, psychotic melancholia. The narcissism is an obsession directed with quirk of violence that shifts the mind from reason to that of passion. The protagonist is going through an intense psychotic phase of psychosis where he is not able to distinguish murder as something diabolic and goes against the Super Ego, the laws of the society. Melancholia is pining for an object that cannot be obtained. Here it becomes a phantasmagoria, the vulture-eye of the old man. The psychotic character is unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. He does not want to take responsibility of the crime and willingly surrenders himself to the police. The psychological build up of psychotic anxiety is a super rendition of art.
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Comments (1)

Hello, psiberite wave
I like everything of Edgar Allan Poe very much.

I think he wanted to separate the evil fom the rest of the old man, and the insanity was that he felt he loves the old man while killing him to remove the evil eye. But the evil eye was the personality of that old man, and it was not possible to separate them.
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by psiberite
created Jan 2018
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