Critical Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe

P Aditya Sreekar
201331101

The Oval Portrait is the first work of Poe that we will examine. It is shorted work I
have seen of Poe, but we can see descriptive Poe at his best. The dark glooms of an
medieval chateau paints a Gothic picture. The narrator is hurt (somehow) and seems
disoriented, the setting of the chateau and architecture in it a kind of depiction of the
narrator's mood, removed from contemporary reality.

This story brings to contrast the mortality of life and permanence of art. A portrait of a
person is eternal, even after the person is dead, the persons form and beautify lives
on forever and for everyone to see. But the contrast between mortality and
permanence gets deeper, because act of making a subject permanent has in
actually cause the death of the subject. So what was the effect of the act? Was the
women made permanent, or did it kill her?

Death of loved ones a common theme in Poes works, but this work is little different
from others. The painter didnt cause the death of his loved one because of hate or
some negative feeling. He was so overwhelmed by his passion for art that he could
see the subject only through the lens of a painting, not as a loved person. Thus
causing her death in the process of immortalizing her. The women was beautiful
before she accepted to model for her husband, but she the painting progressed she
became frail and pale, hence fits the Romantic and Gothic theme of ethereal women.

The Oval painting is centered around painting of a women, women who play
passive figure in the story. Her role is similar to the canvas used by her husband,
she is ready to be moulded by her male companion. This is evident when she was
ready to model for her husband, even though she despised art because she has to
share her husbands attention and time with it. The wife's fate acts as a criticism of
the male domination of art, but her compliance and submissiveness prevent her from
serving as more than a silent warning.

The Tell-Tale Heart is a classic example of Poes unreliable narrator, a man who
cannot tell the difference between reality and his inner thoughts. The instability of the
narrator becomes apparent in the first paragraph, where he asserts his sanity and
attributes all signs of madness to his nervousness and over sensitiveness. But the
fact that he is trying to rationalize his world tells us that he is instable. After asserting
his sanity, he gives us an account which has many logical gaps which can be
explained only by his insanity. Poe is known from his detailed description of inner
thoughts of his psychotic narrator, The narrator of this story exhibits reasoning which
are more like reasoning in the realm of dreams.
He was overcome by his paranoia that his loathing for the old-man's vulture like eyes
has overcome the love for the old man. Leading him to premeditate a murder, and
upon all this he states that he is sane because he has consciously made a plan to
avoid getting caught. Later, when he finally succeeds in killing the victim, he
becomes positively cheerful, feeling that he has accomplished his goal cleverly and
with the rationality that he associates with sanity. The unsuspecting behaviour of the
policemen suggests that the narrator is far removed from the realm of reality, the
gravity of the act he has done doesn,t seem to weigh him down. But soon he couldnt
keep his inner thoughts from the reality, he mistook the inner mental agitation
(agitation because of the fear of getting caught) for physical agitation and
misinterpreted the chatter of the police for malevolence.

The irony of the narrators account in The Tell-Tale Heart is that although he
asserts that he is too calm to be insane, he wasnt calm at all. When he was in the
old mans room the last time to kill him, he hears claims that he can hear old mans
heartbeat. But how is that possible? The logical conclusion could be that he was
hearing his heartbeat from all the adrenaline. Or he was in his imaginary realm
where he was able to hear the old mans heart beat, which means that he wanted
the old man to be afraid of him, be unsettled by his presence in his bedroom at this
late hour, just like the narrator was unsettled by the old mans eyes, he wanted the
feeling to be reciprocated at least before he died. This lack of understanding
parallels his lack of awareness of his actions as he chats with the policemen and
highlights the lapses in reason which belie his claims of sanity.

Much as the minute depiction of the prisoner's experiences and senses creates an
atmosphere of anticipatory terror in "The Pit and the Pendulum," Poe's manner of
describing sound becomes a particularly important vehicle for conveying the mood of
"The Tell-Tale Heart." His description of the sound in the last few paragraphs of the
tale is marked by repetitions that are clearly intended to imply the crescendo of
noise. When he says, "The ringing became more distinct:--It continued and became
more distinct," we sense the building tension. The increasing intensity of the beating
is again emphasized by the three repetitions of the phrase "but the noise steadily
increased." Finally, as the narrator's sentences turn rapidly into exclamations, his
repetition of the word "louder" echoes the sound of the beating heart, and his final
shrieks shatter the tension with his confession.

The Black Cat bears similarities with the The tell-tale heart, both the works are
narrated by unnamed persons whose stability is of questionable nature. In The
Tell-Tale Heart the narrator is in a state of denial and believes that he is completely
sane and tries to rationalize his actions. But in this work the narrator was well aware
of his state of mind, he was aware of his transformation to murderer, he doesnt
provide any kind of rationalization to the what he has done, which according to me is
the effect of his current situation. Whats the point of rationalization when you are
doomed to die, in fact he it seems like the narrator was telling this story with neutral
mind set, and was trying to garner some sympathy for his sad plight.

Another trait that the narrator shares with other Poes characters is that despite
overall lack of good judgment, he uses some reason and logic to avoid admissions of
his mental abnormality. When he sees the image of the cat on the last standing wall,
he tries to ignore his superstitions and offers a reasonable scientific explanation. The
only superstitious member of the family was his wife, who showed moral support to
her husband despite his deteriorating mental condition. The difference between a
normal and unstable mind is that the unstable mind uses logic to explain things that
normal mind would intuitively understand. Rather than allowing himself to use his
wits to recognize the possible significance of the cats image on the wall, he runs
away from his guild by trying to rationally explain what has happened.

The narrator speaks specifically about the spirit of perverseness that combines with
his alcohol dependence to provide the impetus for his transformation into a
murderer. He is particularly careful to explain how perversity drives him to hang his
cat Pluto, and at the time, he understands the evil of his crime and even feels some
measure of guilt over it. The sign of his decreasing sanity comes as much from his
lack of guilt over killing his wife as it does from the actual act of burying his axe in her
skull. His explanation that perverseness is "one of the primitive impulses of the
human heart" is called into question because of his madness, but at the same time,
the story makes us wonder about the truth of his assertion. On the one hand,
perverseness might seem natural to the narrator precisely because he was already
prone to it, despite what he claims was his previously innocent personality. On the
other hand, perhaps he is correct in that perversity exists in all men but is merely
aggravated in him.