METAMORPHOSIS FROM INNOCENCE TO CRIMINALITY IN POE’S “THE TELL-TALE HEART”: A SYMBIOTIC INTERPLAY OF THREE NARRATIVE UNIVERSALS AND FREUDIAN PARAPRAXIS IN UNVEILING THE UNCONSCIOUS

Abstract

This article cracks the structural and unconscious semantic facets of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” collected from his anthology Mystery Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (1907) operating Mier Sternberg’s theory of three universals of narratives that comprise suspense, surprise, and curiosity embedded in the Fruedian lens of parapraxis. Suspense – retaining the reader’s interest in the plot in the pursuit to know what will happen next, catalyzing hope and fear – extracts the automation of developing hope and fear pattern throughout the possessing atmosphere of the story. The restoration of the everyday peaceful situation after the macabre description of the planning and execution of the old man’s murder blooms into surprise with the reversal of the reader’s hope about the narrator’s fate by his lurking fearful doom. The awe-stricken reader is engaged in curiosity only to find the logical interpretation of the perplexed happenings in the story through Fruedian slip/parapraxis – unintentional speech utterances giving clues to the unconscious motives behind human actions – revealing the story of the old man’s murder by the narrator as an allegory of a past crime of the narrator’s child abuse by the old man.  Hence, the innocent-looking old man turns out to be a gruesome criminal in unearthing the play of the narrator’s tongue slips.