This paper analyzes the theme of love and hate in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart". The writer finds that the main character's love for the old man and hate for his evil eye motivate him to kill the old man. Despite claiming to love the old man, the narrator's obsession with the old man's eye reveals his madness and inability to separate his conflicting emotions of love and hate. The story uses the intertwining of these emotions to portray the psychological complexity of the narrator.

1. Ulfaturroifah

2. This paper is written to analyse “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the
purpose of this writing is to analyse and to understand the theme of the story,
especially about love and hate. The writer uses intrinsic theory and close reading as
the method. The writer finds that love and hate become the reason why the main
character decided to kill the old man. In conclusion, the theme of the short story
consists of love and hate.
Keywords: theme, love, hate

3. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843. It tells
about a man who kills an old man, a person whom he lives together with. The story
depicts the personal feelings of the man towards the old man. The author uses
several aspects on how the man acts weird and seems to be a mad person. It is
either the man’s love towards the old man or simply because he is being
psychologically ubnormal.

4. A. The purposes of this study are:
1. To understand the love and hate theme in the story.
2. To appreciate a work of literature.
B. The scope of this study is the analysis of the theme, especially about love and
hate in “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.

5. Edgar Allan Poe is a writer, poet, critic and editor who was born on January 19,
1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. He wrote lots of mystery and horror tales, giving
birth to the modern detective story. Many of his works, including “The Tell-Tale
Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” became literary classics. ‘The Raven,’
which he published in 1845, is considered among the best-known poems in
American Literature.

6. The story shows the man’s obsession to kill the old man since he hate his eyes. It seems
unreasonable for the man to kill the old man as on the first story he says that he loves
the old man. He doesn’t hate him. It is his eyes who scares the man. Since then, every
night the man comes to the old man’s room and tries to find the good time to kill him.
After several visits at the night, the man kills the old man, cut his body and hide the
corpse beneath the floor. The police comes to the house as his neighbours report
something might happen at the house. The man welcomes the cops and even allowed
them to come to the old man’s room. Everything seems to be fine when they have a
conversation, until the man starts to hear a kind of heart beat. He cannot stand it and
at the end, he admit that he had killed the old man and opens the floor, showing the
corpse. He says that the beat was the old man’s heart sound.

7. The story begins with the narrator’s statement “I did not hate the old man; I even
loved him. He had never hurt me.” The only thing that scares the man is the old
man’s vulture eye, the eye that has a film in it and “the eye of one of those terrible
birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body
and pull it to pieces to eat it.” The narrator reveals that those eyes actually triggers
his hatred towards the old man. He actually loves himself, but when feelings of self-
hatred arise in him, he projects that hatred onto an imaginary copy of himself.

8. In the story, Poe portrays the psychological complexity of two opposite emotions—love
and hate, emphasizing the ways they enigmatically blend into each other. Poe’s
psychological insight anticipates the theories of Sigmund Freud, who interpreted love
and hate as universal emotions.
We can call that the man is mad by examining the way he stalks the old man.
“So you think that I am mad? A madman cannot plan.”
“For seven nights I did this, seven long nights, every night at midnight.”
“For it was not the old man I felt I had to kill; it was the eye, his Evil Eye.”

9. The man stalks the old man for eight nights, coming to his room tries to kill him. As he
stated at the beginning of the story, it is not the old man that he hates, it is his eyes.
When the man actually kills the old man at the eighth night, the narrator reveals his
madness by attempting to separate the body of the old man.

10. Despite the fact that the man actually loves the old man, his hatred appears
towards the Evil eye of the old man instead. In the story, the narrator confesses a
love for an old man whom he then violently murders and dismembers. He reveals
his madness by trying to separate the old man, whom he loves, from the old man’s
Evil Eye, whom he hates. This delusional separation remains him unaware of the
paradox of claiming to have loved his victim.