Introduction
Numerous American Gothic Literature creators include mentalities that plummet into madness inside their accounts. Poe’s narratives review his self-existing emotions and encounters of seclusion and dejection that he had to manage throughout his life. He was never privileged with the introduction to the world with guardians; such as how we all usually have our parents and on top of it all, he encountered disregard from his new parents. As confronting dejection, Poe’s personas in his literature classics turn crashed into a condition of madness. Every tale lets the mental personalities to be confronting his fate, dread, torment, or wrongdoing without help from anyone else. This drop into insanity is up to a point faster than some other personas in many classical gothic writings composed. Therefore, personas in Edgar Allan Poe’s classical short stories are obsessed with hysteria and obsession with madness because of isolation which consequences in the innocent characters getting hurt in his masterpieces.
‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ is as yet an applicable tale today as it examines how individuals can be maniacal while conjuring individuals to peek more into the existence and neuroscience/psyche of the individuals who submit detestable killings. In ”The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe shows a mixture of hate, horror, guilt, and excitement as his emotions through the narrator in the story. He also does an excellent job of representing guilt and conscious matter throughout this masterpiece. The author is acting like a mad man to plot this murder over his obsession with the old man’s eyes he gets disturbed. According to Poe, the old man had the eye of a vulture, with a tint of blue color in it. ”For it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.” (Poe, paragraph 3). It is obvious that the narrator is obsessed with the old man’s eye and gets discomforted by it whenever falls upon him. It certainly shows that it is a dangerous thing to dislike constantly and get obsessed with other people. If those behaviors get out of control, people might get hurt for no reason in the end.
Research Paper
Introduction Paragraph
Describing the state of mental anguish and the gradual descent into madness is, perhaps, one of the most difficult tasks that a writer can face since it requires threading the line between credibility and emotional impact. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the few authors that managed to find the balance between the two extremes masterfully, creating an environment of intense suspense while constructing a meaningful message for the reader to decipher. Incorporating a clever use of metaphors and stylistic choices, Poe creates an impression of a gradual descent into madness, which echoes the description of anxiety portrayed in Monsour’s “The Parking Lot.”
Body Paragraphs
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe guides the reader through the transformation of the lead character while the latter experiences hate, horror, guilt, and excitement as the story progresses. He also does an excellent job of representing a pang of guilt and conscious matter throughout this masterpiece. The author is acting like a mad man to plot this murder over his obsession with the old man’s eyes he gets disturbed. According to Poe, the old man had the eye of a vulture — a pale blue eye. ”for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.” (Poe, paragraph 3). It is obvious that the narrator is obsessed with the old man’s eye and gets discomforted by it whenever falls upon him. It certainly shows that it is a dangerous thing to dislike constantly and get obsessed with other people. If those behaviors get out of control, people might get hurt for no reason in the end.
There were many unfortunate moments in Poe’s life that might have contributed to and shaped his style of writing. Those moments might have gotten him into creating an obsession with an eye, the hatred of an old man in his story, and get the narrator to design a criminal act. Poe, using his main character, the narrator, draws readers into a mixture of paranoia, guilt, and a puzzling matter of consciousness throughout his story. The author’s idea is also to get readers to feel more connected to the character’s mental situation and reactions to any simple thing.
According to a website titled “Edgar Allan Poe and His Tales of Horror,” Poe’s both parents died when he was three years old, which was why he was raised as a foster child. He had lots of problems during his schooling years because of his gambling addiction. He got kicked out of university and then the US Military Academy as well over lack of financial support. After the death of his young wife, his life then had a long struggle with depression and alcohol addiction. The style of Poe’s writing is uniquely designed by him to give readers not only excitement and mystery to solve but also some chance to reconsideration of how they live and behave in their daily life (“Edgar Allan Poe and His Tales of Horror”). This way, they can avoid getting obsessed with other people around them.
Although seemingly having very little in common, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Parking Lot” share a range of ideas and even help to create similar impressions in their readers, the poem being emotionally more constrained yet representing the same sense of wistfulness and loss. In both of these literary works, the point of view is of narrators and they are telling the story in their way. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the author’s idea is to make his story more attractive to readers with all the paranoia and mystery in the story. His main character is the narrator himself and the obsession and guilt of the narrator in the game field of this story.
In turn, “The Parking Lot” attempts at capturing the fluidity of time and the sense of wistfulness that comes with the understanding of the inevitability of change. In addition, Monsour’s “The Parking Lot” shares several stylistic characteristics with Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” For instance, both authors use colors to drive the readers’ attention to specific details of their narrative. While the color blue is mentioned in both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Parking Lot” as a symbol of emotional coldness, other colors are also utilized masterfully by both authors. For example, Monsour draws the reader’s attention to the “peach and blood horizon,” as well as the “pale” moon (Monsour line 6).
In the specified excerpt, the reddish colors are expected to evoke a sense of unease and alarm. In turn, one could argue that in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the color red is implied throughout the novel. Namely, apart from red typically being immediately associated with a heart, the scene of the protagonist dismembering the corpse is drenched in metaphorical red color, which, in the novel, turns into the color of murder and, implicitly, madness (Alshiban 708). Thus, Mansour’s poem raises the themes of anxiety and unease, using red as the means of conveying it, whereas Poe takes the idea of red symbolizing anxiety to the extreme, escalating it to madness.
In both of these literary works, loneliness is the common theme. While Poe takes the specified concept to its extreme, portraying descent into madness, Monsour focuses on a more composed and controlled sense of wistfulness. Nonetheless, both authors depict the state of being lonely quite vividly. In “The Parking Lot,” the narrator calmly sits in her car in a parking lot and watches people around till she feels better. During her stay, she does not mean any harm to others. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the loneliness of the author is a major element of the violence in his story. That is why Poe writes his story in a series of exciting stages with some mystery and uncertainty. His idea in this story is to create a narrator with mental issues which occurred to the author’s long-time loneliness (Yusuf 14). An unfortunate circumstance of loneliness for a long time increases the chance of having mental problems which might lead to some unpleasant behaviors. If a person in such a situation cannot avoid getting obsessed with other people around him, he may end up hurting someone for nonsense or gets into a plot to do so in some way.
In summary, both authors managed to express an unsettling feeling of loneliness and unease, which, in Poe’s work, culminates in the triumph of madness and the eventual loss of self as the protagonist continues to hear the beating of the murdered man’s heart. The choice of color scheme, which is expressively clear in Monsour’s work and heavily implied in Poe’s novel, accentuates the increasing tension and the need for the emotional release, which the protagonists experience toward the end. At the same time, the approaches that both authors use to convey the emotional strain experienced by the leading characters are quite different.
Whereas Poe focuses specifically on the direct description of the feelings of the leading character, Monsour strives to relay the changes in the protagonist’s perspective by describing the environment in which the character is placed. The specified choice defines the approach that Monsour adopts to convey the intended message, namely, the use of color and its gradual shift. For this reason, both authors shared a unique approach to describing a state of emotional confusion and loneliness, which requires immediate resolution.
References
Alshiban, Afra Saleh. “Sadism, Fantasy, and the Compulsion to Kill in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 2, no. 7, 2012, pp. 703-722.
“Edgar Allan Poe and His Tales of Horror.” NPS, 2018. Web.
Monsour, Leslie. “The Parking Lot.” LeslieMonsour, 2006. Web.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” PoemMuseum, 1843. Web.
Yusuf, Adi. “Gothic Elements and Psychoanalytic Study in the Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.” EDUCULTURAL: International Journal of Education, Culture and Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2018, pp. 13-19.