The Tell-Tale Heart Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David Halliburton

Critical Essay by David Halliburton

SOURCE: "Tales: 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," in Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View, Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 333-38.

In the following essay, Halliburton draws attention to Poe's use of sound and his depiction of the narrator as both victimizer and victim in "The Tell-Tale Heart. "

The moon in "Irene" watches the sleeper and worries about the harmful effects of an influence it does not recognize as its own. The first William Wilson watches his sleeper, the other Wilson, with full knowledge of the harm he intends, then fails to inflict it. The relation of the sleeper and the watcher in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is similar but more extreme. Here the watcher has no guardian role, as in the sleeper poems; unlike the first Wilson, he is not intimately involved with the sleeper, who means nothing to him. The defiant attitude of the second Wilson provides some slight justification for...
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