Literary criticism over madness and symbols in Edgar Allan Poe short Essay

Literary criticism over madness and symbols in Edgar Allan Poe short stories - Essay Example As he tells his frequently bizarre and frightening tales, Poe presents his readers with symbol-rich imagery and descriptions based on binary oppositions to help build the suspense and horror of his tale. As Mowery explains, binary oppositions are things such as hot and cold, male and female, dark and light. â€Å"It is in the subtle shifts in our expectations of the character that tension and conflict are developed† (1997). This concept is frequently illustrated in terms of the madness that comes upon characters as they experience deep feelings that had potential to overwhelm. In â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart,† â€Å"The Black Cat† and â€Å"Ligeia,† Edgar Allan Poe uses madness and symbolism to convey love and hate. Poe employs two primary objects in â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart† to illustrate the cause of his narrator’s madness. The old man’s eye is the first of these symbols to appear within the text of the story. As the narrator attempts to explain why he felt led to murder, he says, It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! 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; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. (156). Basic medical knowledge to the modern reader quickly identifies this condition as symptoms of a cataract, a film that gradually creeps over the eye of an elderly person, eventually rendering him or her blind while also changing the color of the eye to a pale bluish color. It is this encroachment that seems to so bother the narrator,