The Malevolence Inside
...all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” (Poe 3). Perhaps the heaven that he is referring to represents his good qualities, while the hell he refers to shows his evil, and blood lust. This wicked side of the storyteller is shown with passion when he describes the hatred he has toward the old mans eye. The narrator didn’t hate the old man; in fact he says he “loved the man” (3). In the story, the narrator hated this mans eye so much that it drove him to murder the man. He describes the eye by saying, “He had the eye of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold [. . .]” (Poe 3). He thinks that the eye is always focused on him, and that its soul purpose is to terrorize his life. The thought that this eye threatens the storyteller is an extreme sign of paranoia. Perhaps Poe meant for this eye to resemble the eye of god, meaning that it can see through the narrator and view his self denial of the internal evil he so clearly possesses. The scene where the narrator kills the old man is undoubtedly one of the stories most intense parts. The storyteller hears a heartbeat before he enters the old mans bedroom to commit the sinister act. This is a nervous situation for this insane man, because he says the heartbeat was getting louder, and he is concerned about neighbors hearing it. He claims the heartbeat he hears gave him courage to kill the old man. While reading this the listener may find this odd because the narrator claims before that his motive for killing the man is the vulture eye. It’s possible that the heartbeat the narrator hears is his own, and the sound grows louder the closer he comes to killing the old man. After the murder, the narrator carefully plans how to hide the body, and any evidence of the crime. He cleans the body and buries it in the floorboards of the old man’s room. The speaker laughs at his work because he is proud of how well he concealed the body in the floor. Laughter is shown previously in the story by the mad man. He laughs at how the old man cannot sleep because of noises he hears in the middle of the night. Constantly the storyteller claims he is not crazy, but there is so much evidence of his self denial throughout the story to prove him wrong. The frequent laughter shown by the narrator at these horrible events, shows how sick he really is. Toward the end of the story investigators come to the house because of reports of screaming. The murderer acts calmly through the visit by the investigators. When being questioned by the men, the narrator serenely takes a seat directly above where he had buried the old man’s body. The fact that he is comfortable doing this is more evidence of how sick he really is. The narrator quickly becomes nervous again when he begins to hear the hea...