Last week I attended sample lectures for professors who were looking to come work in the Literature department to give student feedback to the hiring committee. In my first sample lecture, we looked at a text by Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man which was published in 1952. Here is a link to the free version of the text if you want to look at it: https://www.are.na/block/13323900. In the very beginning of the text it says, “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe,” and when reading The Tell-Tale Heart, I was immediately taken back to when I was analyzing this text in the lecture.
Within the first pages of the Invisible Man he describes a violent interaction with a man (this can be found on page 4 of the PDF) and his realization that the man could not see him, and was later described as mugged in the newspapers. In Poe’s description of being haunted by a ghost (which I would like to acknowledge the invisible man is not a ghost). Poe was being haunted by someone that he could see saying that he saw a “pale blue eye” which he believed he was being haunted by, in this same page he states that he was never wronged by the man who was haunting him but he could not see. This contrasts with the invisible man who was not able to be seen, and had wronged the man that he had interacted with on the street.
The Invisible Man text began by stating that he wasn’t a ghost that was haunting, but in the text he also describes living in dark corners of basements, and “living in a hole in the ground”. The book starts by setting the ground work that he is not a haunting ghost, however, while I was reading The Tell-Tale Heart, all I could think about was the sections of the Invisible Man that we had explored in the lecture. I encourage you to take a look at the prologue of the link that I put above for the book and further read the similarities and differences between that text and Poe’s story. I liked analyzing the stories and seeing how they compared to each other and how they were very similar but also very different at the exact same time.
That’s an interesting catch. Upon reading a bit of the prologue, I can see the parallels that you mention: the “dull blue eyes” of the old man in The Tell-Tale Heart and the invisible man’s unintended victim: “a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me…”
Another parallel is that both the narrator in Poe’s story and the Ellison’s invisible man are tormented by the lack of acknowledgement from others of their existences. Poe’s narrator went mad as the officers didn’t seem to acknowledge his discomfort and continued chatting, and Ellison’s invisible man almost killed the dude because he could (literally?) not see him. It does give off the feeling that Invisible Man‘s prologue was inspired by Poe’s short story, or was intended to have that similarity considering how he opened with the reference to Poe.
Thanks for the read!
Anh