Powerful ideas often accommodate more than one strand of logic, and when they do it is in the weft of multiple interpretations that their power lies. In less than an hour, marketers can read the story and watch the film and treat themselves to a masterclass in idea drift. It ceases to be an exploration of madness, motive, fear, and guilt instead it becomes a one dimensional portrait of revenge. This removes the ambiguity and alters the intent of the story.
The eye becomes the physical motif of cruelty. A backstory is developed in which the elderly victim is the abusive master of the man who murders him. The flaw of the 1941 film is that it commits unambiguously to one of these possibilities. And it is possible that there was genuine motive which our narrator has not shared because the trauma of the deed has brought him to focus on a vulture eye as a motive of convenience. It is possible that this is the cold-blooded work of a psychopath convinced of his own rightness.
It is possible that the entire episode is a figment of the (unreliable) narrator’s imagination. The story is cleverly constructed so that logic permits many interpretations. When the police come to visit, there is no visible trace of wrongdoing, but the sound of the dead man’s beating heart rings on in our narrator’s ears until his guilt overpowers him and he gives himself up. This pushes our narrator over the edge, and he first smothers, then butchers, then buries him under the floor boards. These obsessive compulsive inspections finally disturb the old man, who then sits awake in his bed in mortal fear, his heart pounding audibly. He has spent a week inspecting it by lantern light in the dead of night as his elderly victim lies sleeping. The Tell-Tale Heart is the breathless short story of a man who, if he is to be believed, has been driven to murder because the sight of someone’s white-veiled, vulture-like, always-open eye has become unbearable to him.
So once more I need to shut out the August sunshine, pretend it’s the middle of the night, and enter the macabre and fragile world of the human mind. Today Edgar Allen Poe walks us along the tight rope between sanity and insanity in his psychological thriller, The Tell-Tale Heart.
0 kommentar(er)
