Although Poe was one of America’s most major writers, his childhood was filled with sorrow and difficulty, overflowing with deaths and failures that likely motivated the psychological turmoil in his story. When Poe was very young he was put up for adoption and unfortunately this caused him to lose who he truly was, he lacked self-identity. When his foster mother grew seriously ill Poe was forced to switch from school to school where he was often bullied for his inability to fit in. “But he was not accepted as an equal; he was taunted about being the son of actors and about his unconventional position in the Allan household” (“Edgar Allan Poe” Concise 3 ). Despite the fact that school is a place for learning rather than inappropriate and cruel …show more content…
The narrator grew a disliking towards the old man, he believed his eye was like a vulture, which placed a cold feeling upon his skin and through his veins with every glance it made at him. “When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold” (Poe 64). Correspondingly one can infer that both the eye and the beating heart share common traits and both symbolize the theme of sin and guilt. Because the eye is like a vulture, which is a bird that feeds upon the sick and dead, it stands as a symbol of guilt because similarly guilt is a burden that eats away at the conscience, which directly connects the eye to the beating heart. The old man’s eye taunted the narrator; it was a constant reminder of who the narrator truly was that he longed to get rid of. Upon every night around twelve the narrator cautiously watched the old man, there outside his bedroom door he wished to kill the innocent man to close his evil eye at once. “And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever” (Poe 65). This indicates how the narrator had gone mad and could no longer withstand the constant reminder of the identity he was ashamed of. Oddly, the narrator once love the old man, but something about his eye reminded him of the past. According to Kachur, the old man stands as a reflection of the narrator’s character and other identity that he wishes to conceal. “An understanding of the old man as an abusive father figure, however, reveals him as uniquely triggering the narrator’s anxieties about his own parental introject. In other words, the old man mirrors, because he has created, the internalized identity that the narrator seeks to punish and escape” (Kachur 6). In summation, the eye of the old man constantly reflects who the