I am doing a research paper on "Tell-Tale Heart" and a need a good thesis statement! If anyone could help me I would really appreciate it! Thanks

-- Anonymous, February 04, 2003

Answers

Tales of the Imp of the perverse. You might start with that well descibed theory-story of how one wills and accomplshes one's own destruction with foreknowledge and obsession. "The Black Cat" "The Raven" and many other stories can be seen that way. the protagonist does it all tohimself. Others, crimes, reality simply comes second to the relentless self plunging into a self-destructive abyss out of shee vertigo. In order to do this he must first engage in self-deception and repression of external truth- but it comes out in the end. Still, ALL is part of the internal drama. The old man's heart, the black cat or dead wife, the Raven... are all unimportant, even evasions of the hero's self defeat. the heart is not the old man's despite the only statement coming from the unrelaible madman. it is likely his own heart as he has described it throughout the story until he externalized his turmoil into the murder of the old man. Absent the old man, when it comes inopportunely back, he keeps denying the reality and attacks the old man' again.

Another tack is why the "heart" is hideous- or the eye. Both ugly sight and sound are a metaphysical offense to the poet whose ideal is beauty in an ugly, threatening world. Good argument that the madman is yet another rendition of the dark Romantic artist found everywhere in Poe, an extreme, crippled version, but one of the same general type.

-- Anonymous, February 05, 2003

I would use the thesis: no one, and i mean no one can commit a perfect murder, as was the case in Tell Tale Heart

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2004