The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
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My thoughts on The Tell-Tale Heart
The Tell-Tale Heart is a horror fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. It has not too many plots of ups and downs, neither complicated clues or complex relationship between characters. There are only two people in the novel, “me” and the old man. The novel?s plot and narration are very simple but inconceivable. Nevertheless, it is these simple plots and narrations that make the murder thrilling and make people feel scared and terrified. All these things proved Edgar Allan Poe was an amazing and successful novelist, especially in writing the horror fictions.
After finishing the novel, we know that the hero did not have an clear appearance to make people remember him, but his ugly and ferocious heart was deeply kept in people?s mind. The hero feared the old man?s eye, and the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye that the hero called made the man take the old man?s life, in other words, the eye was the motive for the killing. But we know, actually the old man had never wronged him or insulted him in the daily life. Say from this aspect, the hero was not a normal person, and we can say he was a cold-blooded and remorseless devil. However, when he murdered the old man, he was cautious, careful even a little rational. It seemed that he was a normal person. After he killed the old man, he did not feel guilty or scared about that. On the contrary, he even was pleased and happy with what he had done. From these two aspects, we can easily know that the hero was a person of split personality, just like those psychotics, when they suffer the mental stimulation, they will be terrified and become cruel, which is like a kind of self-defense. In this novel, the man often heard some sounds that actually did not exist, and he would always be very irritable by these sounds, especially at the end of the novel, when the police came to him, he heard the sounds of the old man?s heartbeat. Because he could not bear it, these sounds made him mad and he thought the police had known the deed, and finally he even admitted his crime. I think his behavior results from his fear in his heart. He killed the old man, and this had already a shadow in his mind. When he police came to him, outwardly, he was calm and careful, but in fact he had been stimulated, otherwise, he would not reacted violently when he heard these sounds. And at the same time, from this point, we can see another feature of the hero: he was suspicious. He had the persecutory delusion. The old man did nothing to him, but he thought the old man?s eye threatened him and killed the old man. How strange and extreme his thoughts were! This is a typical example of the persecutory delusion.
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