Chua is a multimedia associate with the National Council of Teachers of English. In the following essay, he examines the role of the twin and the doppelganger in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
A salient feature in many of Edgar Allan Poe's stories is the concept of a nemesis appearing as a doppelganger. A doppelganger is a double— an apparitional twin or counterpart to another living person. In Poe's stories involving a doppelganger, the protagonist identifies closely with the antagonist and vice versa. The double appears in such stories as "The Purloined Letter," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Tell-Tale Heart." The idea of the protagonist fighting a counterpart occurs so often in Poe's works that critics often suggest that it indicates Poe's attempts to work out, through his writings, his own inner conflicts and.....
