英美小说论文

On the Themesof Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart摘要: 爱伦.坡的著名短篇小说《泄密的心》主要包含了几个明显的主题：老人的眼睛，时间的概念，有罪和无罪，整篇故事都是围绕着这几个主题发展下去。

他们构成故事的主要线索，体现了爱伦.坡独树一帜的多面和反传统的写作风格。

Abstract: Allan Poe’s famous short story The Tell-Tale Heart mainly contains several distinct th emes: the old man's eyes, the idea of time, guilt and innocence. The whole story develops around these themes, which are the clues of the short story, showing Allan Poe's writing style: many facets of the unique and anti-tradition.Key words: the tell-tale heart, themes, terrorI Introduce:The narrator murdered an old man, for a freakish reason that one of his victim’s eyes “resembles that of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it.”(Sale, 134). He waited for the chance, and committed the crime one night, after which he soberly deposited the dead body under the floor and destroyed all the traces. Policemen came, but they detected nothing of the murder. However, when he fancie d he heard the old man’s heart beating louder and louder, he cannot stand the psychological pressure any longer. Thus he confessed to his horrible deed. The author will try to expound this work through the three themes.II The themes in this story2.1The old man's eyesAs a controversial writer in literature history, Poe was dubbed by harsh critics as "decadent", "sick" and even the spirit of "insane", but his persistent exploration of mental state, the inner world of the person who jammed the brain's been ceaseless and unconscious and subconscious mental activity as its won the father of psychoanalytic criticism and detective novels. A nd these characteristics have also been expressed in his The Tell-Tale Heart.The narrator insists that he loves the old man, has no personal animosity toward him, does not want his money, and has not been injured by him. Instead, he says he wishes to kill the oldman because of his eye! Although there is no way to understand this obsession, the reader must determine the method and meaning of the madness. For Poe, there is no such thing as meaningless madness in fiction.Poe's theory that every element in a short prose story should contribute to its overall effect is exemplified by the fact that the protagonist/narrator is obsessively concerned with his irrational desire to kill the old man because of the old man's eye and by his rational method of proceeding. Poe's stories are often characterized by a psychological mania held in check by the rational control of the narrative structure of the story itself. The narrator insists that his logical plot to kill the old man and the calm way he tells the story are evidence of his sanity. This reflects Poe's primary narrative method.I think the narrator has a neurotic personality, and he is a cruel psychopath. At the very beginning of the story, he said, “True! —nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but w hy will you say that I am mad?” This sentence makes me uncomfortable, because such a weird atmosphere surrounds me and I don’t know what the mad narrator is going to do. I judge him as a person who has the neurotic personality; because he said he desired his eyes and di dn’t care about his treasures. He killed an old man just because the old man’s vulture eyes. The poor old man didn’t have some annoying behavior or some words can make the narrator really mad. This motive for murder is very ridiculous and seems unreasonable, and this makes contribution to let me verify that the narrator is a psychopath. It can’t be denied that he is a very careful killer. While walking into the old man’s room at the eighth night, he opened the lantern extremely careful and said “you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily -- until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.” Exaggeration this description is, but it makes me notice the madman’s carefulness and cautiousness.2.2The idea of timeThe idea of time, this theme often appears in Poe's works, in The Tell-Tale Heart,the writer use this theme again.The narrator's own terror and awe is related to his obsession with time. He associates the central image of the beating of the heart with the beating of a clock; he says the old man listens, just as he has done, to the death watches (a kind of beetle that makes a ticking sound in the wall; he emphasizes how time slows down and almost stops as he sticks his head into the old man's room. To comprehend the meaning of time for the narrator, we must consider the significance of the title and ask: what tale does the heart tell? Although at the end of the story, the beating heart beneath the floor gives the murderer away, more generally, every heart tells the tale of passing time—each beat bringing one closer to inevitable death.A secondary theme in The Tell-Tale Heart the role of time as a pervasive force throughout the story. Some critics note that the narrator is obsessed with time. While the entire narrative is told as one long flashback, the narrator is painfully aware of the agonizing effect on him of time. Although the action in this narrative occurs mainly during one long night, the numerous references the narrator makes to time show that the horror he experiences has been building over time. From the beginning, he explains that his obsession with ridding the curse of the eye has “haunted him day and night.” For seven long nights the narrator waits for the right moment to murder his victim. When on the eighth night the old man realizes that someone is in his room, the narrator remains still for an entire hour.The old man’s terror is also felt by the narrator, who had endured “night after night hearkening to the death watches in the wall.” (Death watches are a type of small beetle that live in wood and make a ticking sound.) For the narrator, death and time are clos ely linked. He explains that “the old man’s hour had come,” all the while painfully aware of the hours it takes to kill a victim and clean up the scene of the crime.What drives the narrator over the edge is hearing the overwhelming sound of a heartbeat, which he compares to “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” Yet after killing the old man, the narrator says that for “many minutes, the heart beat on.” He repeats his comparison of the heartbeat to a ticking watch as the unrelenting sound drives him to confessto the police. The narrator’s hour has also arrived.2.3Guilt and InnocenceThe guilt of the narrator is a major theme in The Tell-Tale Heart. The story is about a mad person who, after killing a companion for no apparent reason, hears an interminable heartbeat and releases his overwhelming sense of guilt by shouting his confession to the police. Indeed, some early critics saw the story as a straightforward parable about self-betrayal by the criminal’s conscience.The narrator never pretends to be innocent, fully admitting that he has killed the old man because of the victim’s pale blue, film-covered eye which the narrator believes to be a malignant force. The narrator suggests that there are uncontrollable forces which can drive people to commit violent acts. In the end, however, Poe’s skillful writing allows the reader to sympathize with the narrator’s miserable state despite fully recognizing that he is guilty by reason of insanity.III ConclusionAs an outstanding work of Allan Poe， The Tell-Tale Heart makes us to think about the sanity and insanity in the society.Historians note that Poe’s writings emphasizing the dark side of humanity and nature challenged the optimistic and confident spirit of the American people during the nineteenth century. From this work, we can learn the weakness of men and the unique writing styles of Poe.IV Bibliography荒诞中的合理———从人格心理学的角度剖析小说《泄密的心》,中国矿业大学文法学院张牧潇薛梅，王杏娟，简海红，刘海平.英美小说选读［M］长春：吉林人民出版社，2008.。