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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
The story’s opening paragraph introduces the idea of mental illness. The narrator’s repetition of words like “nervous,” “mad,” and “heard” foreshadows the main themes: madness caused by sharpened senses and denial of madness by the person suffering from it. Thus, the short story can also be read as an investigation of the concept of “insanity defense,” which gained notoriety in 1843 in the wake of Daniel M’Naghten’s murder trial.
The narrator’s obsession with a particular body part, an eye, illustrates the process of mental deterioration. It also marks the beginning of a process of dehumanization. By divorcing the old man as a person from his eye, the murderer can compartmentalize their emotions. They state that “I loved the old man” and that it was “not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye,” demonstrating how the eye becomes a separate, personified entity in the narrator’s mind (Paragraphs 2, 3). The body dismemberment after the murder further renders the old man into pieces of flesh, creating a sense of dissociation from the crime.
However, despite the narrator’s attempt to physically hide the evidence and mentally disengage from their terrible act of murder, they are unsuccessful in escaping punishment.
By Edgar Allan Poe
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Annabel Lee
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Berenice
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Hop-Frog
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Ligeia
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Tamerlane
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The Black Cat
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The Cask of Amontillado
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The Conqueror Worm
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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
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The Fall of the House of Usher
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The Gold Bug
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The Haunted Palace
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The Imp of the Perverse
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The Lake
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The Man of the Crowd
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The Masque of the Red Death
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The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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The Oval Portrait
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