In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Tell-Tale Heart” and Hemingway’s “A clean, Well-Lighted Place,” we are given a
chance to see the life of wealth, but lonely old-men. Both short stories take
advantage of old men as the material to develop its plots.
In Poe’s short story, we see how a
mental-deteriorated man murder the old man whom he loved; in Hemingway’s short
story, we see how people at different age react to the old and to their
loneliness. No matter using old man as a victim to depict a distorted heart or
setting old man as a discussed topic to disclose the problem of the old in the
society, both authors depicted the characters through the eye of other tales.
Though using the same material to develop
stories, there is still a big difference between the two works. The most
difference is, “The Tell-Tale” is composed in the way of monologue, while “A
clean, Well-Lighted Place” is composed with multiple dialogues.
“Dialogue generally distinguishes itself as pure, unfiltered, and
straight from the source without a narrator to manipulate it (The Geometry of
dialogue).” That is, dialogue plays a vital to form a story. Hemingway used dialogues
between the young and the old waiters to explore and to concern the life of the
old. The old waiter realizes the feeling of the old man, so he is patient to
wait for him until three o’clock in the morning. Nonetheless, the young waiter
thinks the old man as a stray. He wants the old man to leave the café as soon
as possible because he has a wife waiting for him in the bed. He can’t realize
why a rich man leads life in this way. What’s worse, he doesn’t want to know
more about it. The old waiter is unwilling to to go home because he wants to
provide other lonely old men a light and warm place. For him, it’s better to
service people other than sleeping alone, but for the young waiter, nothing is
warmer than being with people whom he loved. Hemingway concerned the old on the
corner of the society through the voice of the old waiter. In the same time, he
satirized those who treat the minority with indifference via the voice of the
young waiter. He didn’t depict much in the plot, but he makes the theme of the
story visible in dialogues. “To linger too long in the choppiness of dialogue
disrupts the smoothly connected paragraph of the narrative (The Geometry of
Dialogue).” I think it’s the reason why Hemingway makes the story a dense
vignette. The proper use of dialogue not only attracts readers to follow the
author’s thoughts, but also disclose the theme of the work in a proper way.
On the other hand, Poe didn’t use
any dialogues in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He used words to make depiction, to
provide the details, and to study paranoia. For not confusing audience, he
provided as many details as he could in the story. His languages lead us to the
mental world of a paranoia victim. “In dialogues, characters are avoiding (and
revealing through avoidance their true feelings) their true feelings (The
Geometry of Dialogue).” If a novel is aim to describe certain traits or mental
condition of a certain character, it’s better to have it taken on with
descriptions instead of too many conversations, for the excessive dialogues
will lead to misdirection.
To heighten readers’ association with the
murder’s image, Poe specified the objects which stand for the murder’s emotion:
the old man’s blue-evil eye, the heartbeat, and his own claim to sanity. “The
Tell-Tale Heart” is filled with economic style and pointed language, which contributes
to the reliable explication of paranoia.
For most readers, “The Tell-Tale
Heart” is harder than “A clean, Well-Lighted Place” to be read and be understood
because of the lack of dialogue. In addition, Poe used more words to cultivate
the atmosphere of the story and to talk about a tougher topic. “The Tell-Tale
Heart” is about a man who suffers from paranoia; thus he killed the old man
resulted from his incapability to bear his blue-evil eye. The narrator of “The
Tell-Tale Heart” even rationalizes his behavior by viewing his unusual
sensitivity as excuse of his sanity. He doesn’t consider it as a symptom of
madness. The most mocked part is that he killed the old man even though he
loves him, which is another central contradiction to the story. Here Poe
indicated a psychological mystery that people sometimes hurt those whom they
love or is essential to them in their lives. The contradiction between the
narrator’s love and resentfulness toward the old man makes a climax in the
story. He separates the old man’s eyes from him because he wants to split his
hatred toward the evil-like eyes and his love toward the old man. Thus, he
murders the one whom he loved with love. To him, the death of the old man gives
his love a space to breath. His desire to eliminate the man’s eyes provides him
an impulse to his murder, but he himself does not look upon the result as the
ending of the old man’s life. Not until the appearance of police officers does
the narrator face his mistakes. The beating of his own heart is like the
beating of the old man’s heart, hurting and torturing his mind.
Both stories are
thought-provoking, although they were taken on in such different way. I
wallowed in Hemingway’s“A clean, Well-Lighted Place” because of his proper use
of dialogue. The function of dialogue is to attract readers and to simplify a
complex content. On the other side, it took me a while to understand the
outline of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Without the attraction of the dialogue,
readers must be more patient to figure out the why and how of the story.
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