Hamlet And The Tell Tale Heart Comparison

Finding Value Through the Lens of Men of Letters
Freud is supposed to be a psychologist, someone that readers and patients like Dora should be able to trust. However, as one reads Sigmund Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, one starts to draw more connections between the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”, a proven unreliable narrator and Freud as a person, quite possibly unreliable as well. For me, reading the two works brought to mind Queen Gertrude’s oft-quoted phrase, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (III, ii, 218). In the context of the play, Queen Gertrude is referring to the Player Queen’s promise to never remarry, a promise that Hamlet wishes her to make, but
As readers, we do not need to be told that Holden Caulfield is depressed or going through trauma; we feel it through J.D. Salinger’s use of passive tense over and over again, creating an emotional distance between Holden and the events that are happening to him. Likewise, Poe and Freud utilize the same technique to create their own unreliable narrators (even if it is accidental on Freud’s part). Poe’s use of rhythm and em-dashes helps bring the reader into the mind of the narrator’s madness, showing that he truly is mad. By creating rhythm through em-dashes and short, declarative statements like “I foamed -- I raved -- I swore!” and “It grew louder -- louder -- louder!”, the reader’s pulse, as well as the narrative of the story quickens to match the madness being unleashed (Poe, 306). Likewise, Freud’s language gives us greater insight into his own insecurities and methods of thought, unreliable as they may be. He quickly addresses those who may not believe his method of dream-interpretation by saying that those who have not studied this method “will find only bewilderment in these pages instead of the enlightenment he is in search of, and he will certainly be inclined to project the cause of his bewilderment onto the author and to pronounce his views fantastic” (Freud, 5). Although he may be trying to alleviate the reader's’
Freud tells the reader that “nothing of any importance has been altered in [the record] except in several places the order in which the explanations are given” (Freud, 4). In telling the readers this, Freud helps the reader understand that this is not a simple case study, but a story where the patient’s words and memories are not to be trusted, since they have been reinterpreted through the lens of a person with his own multitude of biases and beliefs. In addition, the way Freud breaks up his analysis of Dora’s dreams alters our perception of time; he chooses to break up the dream scene by scene. For example, he focuses on what locking the door in the first dream must mean. Then, in the next, he analyzes how Dora dressing herself quickly must be related to her subconscious sexual urges. Poe’s narrator as well, has trouble with perception, both of situation and of time. He mentions that “for a whole hour I did not move a muscle”, a feat that seems wholly impossible, but does lend credence to the idea that the narrator is mad, and thus, unreliable (Poe, 304). In addition, the way the narrator perceives his interaction with the cops as satisfactory for his “manner had convinced them” seems unlikely, as he ends up “[speaking] more quickly -- more vehemently” (Poe, 306). It seems likely that the police would have noticed such abnormal behavior, especially since