The Tell-Tale Heart
I remember watching an episode from The Simpsons about Lisa being in a diorama competition, and she sabotages another girl’s diorama of The Tell-Tale Heart by putting a real heart in. I loved watching The Simpsons and after I saw the this episode, I went on a mission to my school’s library to find this story. I first read The Tell-Tale Heart when I was about 10, and I didn't understand anything about it. I liked how creepy the story was, but I didn’t understand what the story was all about. This year, I read it again because I was looking at a list of the best short stories and Poe’s story was one of the first ones on the list.
The Tell-Tale Heart is a story written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843. The story is about how the narrator is in love with an old man, but is terrified of his piercing blue eye. The narrator has a disease that has sharpened all his senses profusely. His hearing was the sense that was most affected by the disease. The narrator hears almost everything. The narrator goes to the old man’s room at 12am for seven days and each day shines a lantern to see the eye. On the eighth day, the old man wakes up and hears the narrator at the door, so the narrator kills him.
The Tell-Tale Heart is one of my favorites because I find it fascinating how none of the characters have names! There is the nameless narrator, the old man, and police officers. One of the things that I love is when stories recount a traumatic event because I get drawn into the story. In The Tell-Tale Heart the narrator says, “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this.” By writing that second sentence, Poe creates an opportunity to interact with his audience and trying to persuade to them to believe that his character is not crazy. The narrator is telling the readers the story about the man to convince them of his sanity. The narrator didn't do a very good job at convincing me of his sanity. I knew the moment I started reading the story that he was crazy. The narrator just gave off an incredibly creepy vibe.
Suspense builds in the middle of the story which kept me engaged. Here we learn about the days leading up to the eighth day. Poe wants emphasize the eighth day as the turning point of the story. By doing so, he is able to elaborate about the climax of the story. The entire rest of the story is about day-eight which is where things get a wee bit more creepy. On the eighth day, the Old Man wakes up. When the he wakes up, the narrator stays in the door way for an hour before slowly making an opening wide enough for the lantern and when it shines in, the beam of light lands perfectly on the old man’s eye. What a coincidence right? I felt like at some points Poe would hyperbolize some things to make the story more interesting, but back to the story. When the light beams on the man’s eye, the narrator decides to kill the man. He goes into the room and put his bed over him. Poe completely lost me there. I have no idea how the bed killed the old man but it did. I am sure that by putting a bed over someone they would not die but I guess the narrator had no other tools to kill the man with. After the old man dies, the narrator takes the floorboards out of the floor and puts the body underneath and covers it up. Later, the police come because someone called in suspected foul play and they had to check. The narrator has a conversation with the officers and during the conversation, the narrator hears a ringing and tries to get rid of it by talking louder. The louder he talked, the louder the ringing got and he convinced himself that it was not ringing but the beating of the old mans heart. The story ends with the narrator confessing to the police officers and telling him about the beating heart. IF THE OLD MAN IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, WHY CAN THE NARRATOR HEAR HIS BEATING HEART? I think that the narrator did not actually hear the dead guys heart beating but he was so consumed with guilt that he lead himself to believe that it was the old man’s hear beating.
Aside from all the hyperbolizing in the story, I really enjoyed The Tell-Tale Heart. I really enjoyed how the narrator is trying to convince you that he is not crazy and every piece of evidence he uses to convince you just makes you think he is that much crazier. It just makes the story that much more fun to read because when the narrator interjects that he is not crazy, it cracked me up. Before the narrator conceals the body he says, “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.” He says this after he has just killed a man for having a pale blue eye. What kind of logic is that? The fact that the narrator killed the old man for such an obscure reason made me want to keep reading and convinced me that he was in fact crazy. Poe’s story convinced me that he is crazy because he goes to the man’s room at the same time for eight days in a row just to look at his eye.
This is the one of most interesting short story I have read this year. I love it! Poe’s writing is brilliant. This story reminds us that your actions will come back to haunt you but in a different way than most stories. In others stories we see how the perpetrator gets punished by going to jail or something cliche like that but in this story, we don’t know if the narrator got caught for killing the man but we know that he punished himself because he wouldn’t stop hearing the beating of the heart.
link to the tell-tale heart: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html
link to the tell-tale heart: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html
A Dark-Brown Dog
My entire life, I have wanted a dog. I remember begging my parents every time we passed a pet store if we could get a dog and they always said no. They always told me no because I had activities to go to after school and no one would be home to walk the dog. This year, I stumbled upon the story, A Dark-Brown Dog and was intrigued with the story probably because of my longing for a canine friend. A Dark-Brown Dog, by Stephen Crane, is a story about a little boy that meets a dog on a street corner. When they first meet, the boy doesn't like the dog and beats him because he thinks it will bring no value to him. Though the boy continues to beat the dog, the dog follows the boy home. When they get to the house, the boy and the dog have grown comfortable with each other and after sitting on the steps the boy welcomes him into his family. The family does not like the dog either and when they first meet the dog, they yell at it and call it names. The dad finally intervenes and decides to let the boy keep the dog. Throughout the story, the family would beat and throw things at the dog when the boy is not around.
The first couple sentences, Crane provided amazing descriptions of the setting. “Sunshine beat upon the cobbles, and a lazy summer wind raised elbow dust which trailed in clouds down the avenue.” When I read that sentence, I picture a little boy standing next to a fence on the street corner in a rural area. I get the sense of a rural area because not many urban areas have dust on the street. Those first sentences are the only descriptions of setting that we get and interestingly, I don't mind that there is not a lot written about the setting.
The part of the story that captured my attention was that Stephen Crane chose to personify the dog when it was experiencing pain. This stood out to me because it made it seem like the little boy thought of the dog as another human. By making the boy think of the dog as a human, it helps the readers understand where the boy gets the idea to hit the dog. When kids are young, they are very impressionable and since this little boy has been beaten before, he thinks it is okay to beat things that he is superior to. Although Crane deliberately does not state that the boy has been abused, he wants the reader to figure it out by themselves and by writing, “He dived under the table, where experience had taught him was a rather safe place”. This leads us, the readers, to believe that the boy had been abused before. One day, the father gets drunk and he hits the dog with a coffee maker twice and throws the dog out of a five story window onto a shed. Though Crane never directly states that the dog is dead, the way he describes how the dog falls, leads us to believe that it is dead. “The dark-brown body crashed in a heap on the roof of a shed five stories below. From thence it rolled to the pavement of an alleyway.” Crane did an exceptional job hinting that the dog was dead in those sentences which made me even more sympathetic to the dog! When authors don't directly state what they mean it allows the reader room to interpret what the author meant. Readers of this story wouldn't necessarily know that the dog had died. I don't even know if the dog had died I just assumed from what I had read that the dog did die. A Dark-Brown Dog is exceptionally written. Stephen Crane finds way to subtly convey his ideas in the story and leave room for interpretation. Crane is describing the way that African-Americans were treated after slavery. It was published in 1901 and was probably written around 1890. When I first read the title, I took it literally and believed this story was going to be about a dog, but it is really supposed to symbolize African-American men. The moment when I realized that I was right was when Crane describes how the relationship between the dog and the boy, “The scene of their companionship was a kingdom governed by this terrible potentate, the child; but neither criticism nor rebellion ever lived for an instant in the heart of the one subject.” I have never read a story that had so much symbolism that could be easily missed.
This story made me have so much respect for Stephen Crane because in 1890 slavery had ended about 30 years ago and African-Americans were not very accepted then. The story was published in Cosmopolitan about 1 year after Stephen Crane had died and I think that Cosmopolitan waited to publish the story until after Crane had died so he wouldn't have gotten any hate. I really liked A Dark-Brown Dog because it is about a topic that was rarely talked about during the time that the story was written. I have extreme respect for those people who are willing to step out of the social norm and do something or write something that is controversial. Stories about controversial topics are more interesting than those about cliche topics like the boy meets girl love story.
link to a dark brown dog: http://web.archive.org/web/20110111180522/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=CraDark.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1
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