★
“This is why, though the old man has a name (“[I] spoke courageously to him, calling him by name” (188)) the narrator never uses it. To do so would be to acknowledge him as a fully present Other, and not as merely a disembodied gaze in the form of an eye. When he kills the old man, the whole room is “black as pitch” with only a ray of light falling precisely “upon the damned spot” (188). For the narrator, the old man is barely even an old man; he is essentially only an eye.”
— Final Paper on “The Tell-Tale Heart”
