English 11

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Term Paper Title	English 11
# of Words	858
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.43

English 11
"Doubles," Don't We All Have Them, In A Way?
The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe, is one of his most famous stories.  This story is told from the point of view of the narrator who also happens to be the main character. The story is a personal struggle between the narrator's thought and his actions.  The question that the reader ponders until about two-thirds into the story is whether or not the narrator will physically control his hatred of the old man.  The reader then bluntly learns the answer to this question and watches the rapid deterioration of the narrator's state of mind.  Although the narrator tells the reader in the beginning of The Tell-Tale Heart that he is afraid of the old man's "vulture" eye, the eye really acts as a shadow to his real hatred.  He hates the fact that he sees some of his own qualities in the old man; this eventually turns him into a crazed murderer.
It becomes evident as early as the second paragraph of the story that the narrator is afraid of the old man's eye.  He says that he can't remember what made him want to kill the old man, but then he remembers the eye, the "pale blue eye, with a film over it."  This quote seems quite unbelievable because no rational man could kill another man over his eye.  This is the exact point in the story where it became evident to me that the "eye" was really just a mask used to hide a deeper reason (series of reasons).
One of the guidelines given to us for this assignment was to "trace the theme of fear throughout the story."  When I tried to use fear as the organizing concept for my paper I realized that it was far too broad.  I began to read the story again and again to find a better framework when I realized that the idea of fear was in fact a good organizing theme, although in a rather indirect way.  The "quality" that the man sees in the old man is one that he himself has and it is fear.  Those seven previous nights that the narrator had spent watching the man sleep may have been a subconscious attempt on the part of the narrator to have the man wake up so that he could see his "eye."  The narrator's need to see the old man's eye was actually a need to see the fear in the old man's eyes.  The fear that naturally occurs when one is awakened in the mi...

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