LINGUISTIC CUES OF DECEPTION IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S THE TELL-TALE HEART: A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This paper examines the practical indicators of deception in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, with a view to the role the linguistic unit plays in building a deceptive character of the narrator and creating a tension in a story. Although the themes of the story, the style, and the psychological aspects thereof have been discussed in literature, the aspect of the story that deception is a means towards an end has not received much attention. The study is conducted based on the idea of Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1969), Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature (1975), and Politeness Framework (Brown and Levinson, 1987), through qualitative textual analysis to detect the markers that include overemphasis, self-justification, contradiction, repetition, hedging or self-repair. All these are the strategies which can be observed in the constant arguments by the narrator that he is sane, extreme details, selective inconsistency, and blame shifting behaviours to hide the truth, recreate the fact and manipulate the listener. The results indicate these markers do not just indicate insincerity but also create the psychological instability in the narrator furthering the suspense by reinforcing the malady of divergence in perception and obscurity in storytelling. In a combination of the literary analysis and pragmatic theory, this contribution to literary pragmatics presents the methodological pattern that will be used to study the unreliable narration. The implications go beyond the field of literary research, enhancing the knowledge about deceptive discourse in other areas of communication and in the field of forensics.