His fear was that in letting the old man live, he risked allowing the fellow to betray him one day by exposing the narrator’s secrets (secrets which he neurotically thinks the eye can detect).
The eye was the reason for the murder – not the old man – and the protagonist has repressed all his fond memories of the old man, seeking to kill him only to keep his (dare I say) accusing, paternal eye from observing and judging him (he has symbolically slain his Superego, or – as we might term it – his conscience). The reasons the protagonist conjures to explain the murder give no reason for the deed other than his immense hatred for the old man’s “eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye with a film over it”. He has already lost communication with his unconscious, and the accusing, paternal Superego, because murder is a cultural taboo. According to the narrator, he is not insane, which means that he is in denial over the crime that has been committed. So how is it that his repression caused him to act sane yet commit murder? The protagonist explains his perspective in the beginning, saying: “How then am I mad? Harken! And observe how healthy – how calmly I can tell you the whole story”. In Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” the protagonist’s fear of the old man’s eye is what drove him to dismember him and put him underneath the floorboards (symbolizing repression). Using these theories in the analysis of a literary work, the reader must interpret what the author is trying to convey as well as what the characters are doing in the story, and although it is not an easy task, all students of critical theory have to know what they are looking for when studying a literary piece. Tyson describes the three: the Id is irrational and tends to want gratification the Superego works in direct opposition to the Id because it internalizes cultural taboos (murder, incest, stealing, etc.) and works to keep the ravenous Id at bay lastly the Ego is “the conscious Self that experiences the external world”. Another part of this theory which Freud developed comes from the concept of the Id, Ego, and Superego.
These stages come from what a person is most afraid of and would work its way through most of their repressed memories to remind them of what could happen.
Akin to the five stages of grief, the stages of repression follow a similar pattern, including “perception, selective memory, denial, avoidance, displacement, and projection”.
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