The Author
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. Poe's publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".
Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845, Poe published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years later. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents.
Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today.
It is very ambitious for a student like me to do an analysis on such a complicated story but there was a lot of curiosity going on inside my head while I was reading it and to dissect it element by element, probably would, if not eradicate, diminish some of the questions.
The Analysis
The story is a First-person Narrative and starts in Medias Res. The narrator seems talking to someone and seems so insistent about his sanity. There were no pronouns used to clarify the gender of the narrator, I would assume that the narrator is a male because no woman, even so strong, would manage to drag a man to the floor and pull the heavy bed over him.”
The prominent characters of the story are the narrator and the old man. I wonder what relationship they have, I have speculations though:
a. The narrator may be a servant to the old man and he might have hated him because he’s strict, bossy, irate, and abusive.
b. The narrator may be the old man’s son and there is a discord between them, and the son’s madness has made him kill his own father.
The narrator was barely characterized. The only characterization we get from the literary piece about him, through self characterization, is that he is sane and the entire story runs about his proving of his sanity and not by his innocence upon the old man’s murder. But this, however, is self destructive because in his attempt to disprove his sanity he, at the same time, fully admits the crime.
The old man too was barely characterized. The repeated description mentioned that is associated to him is his “Vulture eye.” The narrator, through his clearance that he has no motives upon his murder of the old man, has in some way done a characterization on him:
“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”
So what then does the “vulture eye” symbolizes?
a. If the narrator is indeed a servant to the old man, the eyes could be an intimidating power that he wanted to get rid of.
b. If the narrator is a son, the eyes could symbolize parental surveillance and the removal of the eye is freedom from it.
For a week the narrator meticulously goes to the old man’s room at nights to find the perfect time to find the perfect time to commit the murder but he was always unsuccessful for the old man’s eyes were always closed. The old man does not annoy him but his “vulture eye” does and it is the narrator’s driving force to kill him, thus making it the most significant symbol in the narrative.
The policemen who were deputed to search the house also played an important contribution to the story. The narrator claims that amidst the officers presence he hears the heartbeat of the old man coming from under the floorboards and as the noise grows louder he sets into paranoia that the officers also hear the sound and suspect him so he confesses to killing the old man and tells them to tear up the floorboards to reveal the dismembered body.
The narrator claims to have a disease which causes hypersensitivity in his senses. A similar motif is used for Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841). It is unclear, however, if the narrator actually has very acute senses or if he is merely imagining things. If his condition is believed to be true, what he hears at the end of the story may not be the old man’s heart but death watch beetles. The narrator first admits to hearing death watches in the wall after startling the old man from his sleep. According to superstition, death watches are sign of impending death. One variety of death watch beetles raps its head against surfaces, presumably as part of mating ritual, while others emit a ticking sound. Henry David Thoreau had suggested in 1838 that the death watch beetles sound similar to a heartbeat. Alternatively, if the heart beating is really a product of the narrator’s imagination, it is that uncontrolled imagination that leads to his own destruction.
The climax of the story happened at the 8th night of surveillance upon the old man’s slumber. He was awaked; the “vulture eye” was seen…
“…until at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye. It was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.”
He uses his claim of having hypersensitive senses to deny his madness…
“And I have not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? – Now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sounds well, too. It was the beating if the old man’s heart, it increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”
The theme of the story is Denial of Truth. Even though there was a strong denial of the protagonist upon his madness, it is nevertheless proven he is. It is a fact that we, people, have qualities that we can’t believe we possess; we have feelings we can’t accept we feel; we sometimes refute facts because we can’t accept it. But what happens? The truth always comes out, and the worse part is, it sometimes springs from our own mouths.
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WAIT! --- Innocently speaking, how indeed would a madman commit such systematic murder down to the concealment and washing out the evidences? If not for a single shrieked made by the old man he could have escaped the crime. Just a thought…
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