On the Themes
of Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart
摘要: 爱伦.坡的著名短篇小说《泄密的心》主要包含了几个明显的主题：老人的眼睛，时间的概念，有罪和无罪，整篇故事都是围绕着这几个主题发展下去。他们构成故事的主要线索，体现了爱伦.坡独树一帜的多面和反传统的写作风格。
Abstract: Allan Poe’s famous short story The Tell-Tale Heart mainly contains veral distinct themes: the old man's eyes, the idea of time, guilt and innocence. The whole story develops around the themes, which are the clues of the short story, showing Allan Poe's writing style: many facets of the unique and anti-tradition.
Key words: the tell-tale heart, themes, terror
I Introduce:
The narrator murdered an old man, for a freakish reason that one of his victim’s eyes “res
妙法莲华经原文embles that of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it.”(Sale, 134). He waited for the chance, and committed the crime one night, after which he soberly deposited the dead body under the floor and destroyed all the traces. Policemen came, but they detected nothing of the murder. However, when he fancied he heard the old man’s heart beating louder and louder, he cannot stand the psychological pressure any longer. Thus he confesd to his horrible deed. The author will try to expound this work through the three themes.
II The themes in this story
2.1 The old man's eyes
As a controversial writer in literature history, Poe was dubbed by harsh critics as "decadent", "sick" and even the spirit of "insane", but his persistent exploration of mental state, the inner world of the person who jammed the brain's been cealess and unconscious and subconscious mental activity as its won the father of psychoanalytic criticism and detective novels. And the characteristics上海四金 have also been expresd in his
The Tell-Tale Heart.罗志祥几岁
The narrator insists that he loves the old man, has no personal animosity toward him, does not want his money, and has not been injured by him. Instead, he says he wishes to kill the old man becau of his eye! Although there is no way to understand this obssion, the reader must determine the method and meaning of the madness. For Poe, there is no such thing as meaningless madness in fiction.
Poe's theory that every element in a short pro story should contribute to its overall effect is exemplified by the fact that the protagonist/narrator is obssively concerned with his irrational desire to kill the old man becau of the old man's eye and by his rational method of proceeding. Poe's stories are often characterized by a psychological mania held in check by the rational control of the narrative structure of the story itlf. The narrator insists that his logical plot to kill the old man and the calm way he tells the story are evidence of his sanity. This reflects Poe's primary narrative method.
I think the narrator has a neurotic personality, and he is a cruel psychopath. At the very b
eginning of the story, he said, “True! —nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” This ntence makes me uncomfortable, becau such a weird atmosphere surrounds me and I don’t know what the mad narrator is going to do. I judge him as a person who has the neurotic personality; becau he said he desired his eyes and didn’t care about his treasures. He killed an old man just becau the old man’s vulture eyes. The poor old man didn’t have some annoying behavior or some words can make the narrator really mad. This motive for murder is very ridiculous and ems unreasonable, and this makes contribution to let me verify that the narrator is a psychopath. It can’t be denied that he is a very careful killer. While walking into the old man’s room at the eighth night, he opened the lantern extremely careful and said “you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily -- until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.” Exaggeration this description is, but it makes me notice the madman’s carefulness and cautiousness.
牛肉块怎么做好吃
2.2 The idea of time
飞蚊症症状
The 少司命歌手idea of time, th怎样打麻将is theme often appears in Poe's works, in The Tell-Tale Heart, the writer u this theme again.
The narrator's own terror and awe is related to his obssion with time. He associates the central image of the beating of the heart with the beating of a clock; he says the old man listens, just as he has done, to the death watches (a kind of beetle that makes a ticking sound in the wall; he emphasizes how time slows down and almost stops as he sticks his head into the old man's room. To comprehend the meaning of time for the narrator, we must consider the significance of the title and ask: what tale does the heart tell? Although at the end of the story, the beating heart beneath the floor gives the murderer away, more generally, every heart tells the tale of passing time—each beat bringing one clor to inevitable death. 二氧化碳分子量
A condary theme in The Tell-Tale Heart the role of time as a pervasive force throughout the story. Some critics note that the narrator is obsd with time. While the entire narrative is told as one long flashback, the narrator is painfully aware of the agonizing eff
ect on him of time. Although the action in this narrative occurs mainly during one long night, the numerous references the narrator makes to time show that the horror he experiences has been building over time.
From the beginning, he explains that his obssion with ridding the cur of the eye has “haunted him day and night.” For ven long nights the narrator waits for the right moment to murder his victim. When on the eighth night the old man realizes that someone is in his room, the narrator remains still for an entire hour.
