Blog #6 Questions 1 & 2

Question 1:
In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Edgar Allen Poe uses the concept of repression and is widely known to be his most eccentric and psychologically captivating. Repression is defined as the forgetting, or ejection from consciousness of memories of threat, and especially the ejection from awareness of impulses in oneself that might have objectionable consequences. Poe clearly accomplishes that, with a first person story that shows his own preoccupation with death, sanity, and his trouble with human relationships. The events of the story are centered on the murder of an old man, who is never named or thoroughly described except for “one of his eyes resembled that of a vulture, a pale blue eye with film over it”. It was this one eye that was the motivation for the murder of the old man by the narrator, since “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 for ever”. From the opening line, the narrator is pleading his case that he is not mad, and begs the reader to not think of him as such, yet all of the actions separated by dashes indicate the contrary. He goes on to brag about his ability to enter the house for seven straight days at midnight without the old man knowing he is, only to find the eyes of the old man closed and thus the need to kill is gone. However, on the eighth day the narrator makes a noise that startles the old man, which makes him call out “who’s there?”, yet the narrator stays quiet for a whole hour after that, as does the old man. The narrator relishes the thought of the old man fearing for his life now, realizing his life is in eminent danger. At this point, the story accelerates to the killing the old man, which is only described by him moving a heavy bed over him, but includes explicit detail of how the arms and legs were cut off, and discarded under the floor boards. I think that most readers expected the actual killing would have been the main thrust of the use of repression, but it is that of the discarding of the body that is more shocking than that of the actual murder. Perhaps this was in an attempt to keep the reader off balance, using the element of surprise again in his favor. The police arrive at the door in a response to the shriek made by the old man before being murdered, but he says that there is no reason at all for him to worry about it. He eventually cannot overcome the noise in his head, a noise that he thinks is coming from the heart of the dead old man, and confesses to the police by indicating that his body is under the floorboards. His eventual inability to repress his emotions of wanting to kill the old man enables him to commit the murder. Although there is no mention of the consequences of the murder, it is my opinion that this is supposed to be a letter written from prison, as he pleads his case to whoever will listen.

Question 2:
Edgar Allen Poe’s personal life was filled with struggle and hardship, which strongly influenced the darkness exposed in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. He was forced to deal with the estrangement of his father when he was 1 yr. old, his mother died when he was 3, and he lost his “first love” at 15, and his grieving and sense of loss played a role in his unique style of writing. Then his step mother died of tuberculosis not long after this, further straining the relationship he had with his step father. He was sent away to the University of Virginia with just enough money to get there, and no money for food or supplies. He incurred about $2000 in gambling debts which he could not repay and his step father refused to repay, so he fled and joined the Army under a false name to escape being put in prison. He was a brilliant young man with a passion for writing, and all of this devastation comes through poignantly in this short story. The overwhelming feeling of having the ability to contribute, but not the means, comes thru in built up frustration and eventual reconciliation as he reaches the point of no return. I feel that his life experiences, especially those of dealing with the great losses of his mother, step mother, and girlfriend, all at a young age have influenced his own fear of death.
In the article “The Life of Edgar Allan Poe”, Saul Shandly writes of four major influences in Poe’s life: “The most damaging areas in his life repeatedly introduced themselves into his poems and stories among these were alcohol, disease, death, and negative male role models.” I could not agree more with this observance, and this story includes both death and a negative male role model. The alcohol influence on his life was magnified by the fact that he had an allergy to alcohol, which accelerated the rate he would be drunk, usually getting very drunk from just one drink.