![]() ![]() On the eighth night, the narrator’s actions wake the old man up. Since the narrator hates the eye, not the man, they keep postponing the terrible deed. The murderer calls it an “Evil Eye” and is obsessed with getting rid of it (Paragraph 4), despite claiming they loved the old man, who never mistreated them.īefore committing the murder, seven nights in a row, at midnight, the narrator cautiously and slowly opens the door to the man’s bedroom and shines a single ray of light on his sleeping eye, which remains closed each night. The narrator confesses to feeling compelled to commit murder by the old man’s single “pale blue eye,” the eye of a “vulture” with a white film over it (Paragraph 2). The confession is meant to convince the unknown interlocutor of the criminal’s sanity, but it has the opposite effect. The narrator’s age and gender, and their relationship to the victim, are unclear. The unnamed narrator begins by addressing an unknown interlocutor directly, confessing to the murder of an old man in whose house the narrator used to live. ![]() The epigraph was removed from later editions due to Poe’s repeated accusations of plagiarism against Longfellow. Originally, the story included an epigraph with a stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life,” subtitled “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist”:Īrt is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. ![]()
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