“But why you say that I am mad?”ambiguity in the configuration of the narrator in Poe’s the tell-tale heart

Abstract

The following research paper concerns the use of ambiguity in the configuration of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe´s The Tell-Tale Heart. After contextualizing the literary and social environment of the American Romantic Period, we offer a brief study of Poe´s poetics and of the short story as a literary genre. The analysis of the short story is supported by Todorov´s approach on the fantastic, but we also consider other literary critics` views (such as that by Rosemary Jackson) which diverge from his more structural approach. In our analysis we try to show that Poe´s choice of an unreliable narrator contributes to the production of ambiguity; as a consequence, this feeling of hesitation, inherent to ambiguity, constitutes an essential condition for the fantastic to occur in the narrative.