Symbolism in The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe Essay

symbolization in The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe - Essay ExampleAs he tells his much bizarre and frightening tales, Poe presents his readers with symbol-rich imagery and descriptions based on binary oppositions to help build the suspense and crime of his tale. As Mowery explains, binary oppositions are things such as hot and c grizzly, male and female, dark and light. It is in the problematic shifts in our expectations of the character that tension and conflict are developed (1997). This concept is frequently illustrated in foothold of the madness that comes upon characters as they experience deep feelings that had potential to overwhelm. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe uses madness and symbolism to convey cognize and hate.Poe employs two primary objects in The Tell-Tale Heart to illustrate the cause of his narrators madness. The old military personnels eye is the first of these symbols to appear within the text of the story. As the narrator attempts to explain w hy he felt led to murder, he says,It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain just 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 cypher it was his eye yes, it was this He had the eye of a vulture a pale blue eye, with a postulate over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold and so by degrees very in stages I make up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. (156).Basic medical knowledge to the modern reader quickly identifies this condition as symptoms of a cataract, a film that gradually creeps over the eye of an elderly person, eventually rendering him or her blind while in like manner changing the color of the eye to a pale bluish color. It is this encroachment that seems to so bother the narrator, it was not the old man who vexed