The Tell-Tale Heart & The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe

The American Literature 

Name: Parmar Dipali K.

Roll No. : 24

Assignment Sem. 3

Email Id: dipaliparmar247@gmail.com

Submitted to: The Department of English, MKBU.

• About Edgar Allan Poe:
  

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story.

Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre that he followed to appease the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked. Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity.

Poe wrote much of his work using themes aimed specifically at mass-market tastes. To that end, his fiction often included elements of popular pseudo-sciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy.

• His Short Stories:

1. The Tell-Tale Heart:

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story of Poe published in 1843. Unknown narrator told the story. The genre of the story are Gothic, Short Story & Horror. The narrator describes a murder he committed. The victim was an old man with “vulture-eye”. Poe has generated a new style of story-telling. The murder is done and now the murderer started the story of how he murdered. Here is the starting para of The Tell-Tale Heart….

TRUE! --- nervous --- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --- not destroyed --- not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --- how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The story starts with an unknown narrator telling the story of a murder he has done. The victim was an old man working with him in his office and living in the same colony. The murderer has an irritation with the eye of an old man which he called “Vulture-eye”. The old man had never done any wrong with him, even not behaved wrongly. Yet he plot to murder the old man. Seven nights he just goes and observes the old man sleeping in is bed. His eyes were closed. He was finding a chance when the old man’s eye were open and he murders him.

On the eight day he got a chance. The old man sits up in his bed and the narrator kills him cruelly. But here his crime doesn’t end. He makes pieces of the body and hide them into the floorboards. He removes all the signs of the crime. Even when a neighbour of the old man hears the scream and call the police, the narrator confidently invited them to investigate that they won’t found any evidence of the murder. The police set on the right place where the body was hidden yet they didn’t suspect anything wrong. But while talking, narrator hears the heartbeats of the old man from under the floorboards (which is impossible). The sound increases more and more and he feared that the police might hear the sound and it raises a feeling of guilty in the narrator and he confesses his crime.

Analysis:

• Story open with the conversation of the narrator and an unknown person who is not identified at all.
• The listener may be a police, a doctor, a lawyer, a judge or any other person.
• The story is not focusing on the innocence of the murderer but on the sanity of the murder.
• The story is about a systematic actions and precision - rational explanation for irrational behavior.
• The story's final scene, is a result of the narrator's feelings of guilt.
• Like many characters in the Gothic tradition, his nerves dictate his true nature.
• Former poet laureate Richard Wilbur has suggested that the tale is an allegorical representation of Poe's poem "To Science". The poem shows the struggle between imagination and science.
• In The Tell-Tale Heart, the old man represents the scientific rational mind while the narrator is the imaginative.

Meaning of the title:

• Tell-tale: clearly showing something: clearly showing or indicating something that is secret or hidden.
• Here the heart reveals the true fact of murder…
• Symbolically speaking, the self-conscience cannot bear the crime and hence indicates the secret or hidden facts of murder.

2. The Gold Bug:

The Gold Bug is a short story by Poe published in 1843. The plot follows William Legrand who was bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears that Legrand is going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator, who agrees to visit his old friend. Legrand pulls the other two into an adventure after deciphering a secret message that will lead to a buried treasure.

William Legrand has relocated from New Orleans to Sullivan's Island in South Carolina after losing his family fortune, and has brought his African-American servant Jupiter with him. The story's narrator, a friend of Legrand, visits him one evening to see an unusual scarab-like bug he has found. The bug's weight and lustrous appearance convince Jupiter that it is made of pure gold. Legrand has lent it to an officer stationed at a nearby fort, but he draws a sketch of it for the narrator, with markings on the carapace that resemble a skull. As they discuss the bug, Legrand becomes particularly focused on the sketch and carefully locks it in his desk for safekeeping. Confused, the narrator takes his leave for the night.

One month later, Jupiter visits the narrator and asks him to come immediately, fearing that Legrand has been bitten by the bug and gone insane. Once they arrive on the island, Legrand insists that the bug will be the key to restoring his lost fortune. He leads them on an expedition to a particular tree and has Jupiter climb it until he finds a skull nailed at the end of one branch. At Legrand's direction, Jupiter drops the bug through one eye socket and Legrand paces out to a spot where the group begins to dig. Finding nothing there, Legrand has Jupiter climb the tree again and drop the bug through the skull's other eye; they choose a different spot to dig, this time finding two skeletons and a chest filled with gold coins and jewelry. They estimate the total value at $1.5 million, but even that figure proves to be below the actual worth when they eventually sell the items.

Legrand explains that on the day he found the bug on the mainland coastline, Jupiter had picked up a scrap piece of parchment to wrap it up. Legrand kept the scrap and used it to sketch the bug for the narrator; in so doing, though, he noticed traces of invisible ink, revealed by the heat of the fire burning on the hearth. The parchment proved to contain a cryptogram, which Legrand deciphered as a set of directions for finding a treasure buried by the infamous pirate "Captain Kidd." The final step involved dropping a slug or weight through the left eye of the skull in the tree; their first dig failed because Jupiter mistakenly dropped it through the right eye instead. Legrand muses that the skeletons may be the remains of two members of Kidd's crew, who buried the chest and were then killed to silence them.

What is “cryptogram”?

“Cryptogram” is a coded message which is used for the directions of the hidden treasure. In this story this cryptogram is used;

53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡)4‡;806*;48‡8¶60))85;1-(;:*8†83(88)5*†

;46(;88*96*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*- 4)8¶8*;40692

85);)6†8)4;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡1;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48;

(88;4(‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;

Means….

" 'A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death's-head a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.' "

Analysis:

• Though Poe did not invent "secret writing" or cryptography he popularized it during his time.
• Poe's character Legrand explains his ability to solve the cipher in a similar manner as Poe does in "Some Words on Secret Writing".
• Poe's depiction of the African servant Jupiter is often considered stereotypical and racist from a modern perspective.
• Jupiter is depicted as superstitious and so lacking in intelligence that he cannot tell his left from his right.

References

• Poe, E.A., Complete Tales and Poems. web-books.com.

• https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LT_zoDfd4Bw/maxresdefault.jpg
• http://i.grassets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1438758338i/15750046._SX540_.jpg
• http://wondersmith.com/scifi/poe.jpg
• https://www.sites.google.com/site/exmaenglish/m-a-part-2/course-no-10-the-american-literature/poe-short-story

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