‘While polishing the picture frame he discovered –
The wall…
… “ Oh!” cried Huxley, fending him off. (p.86)
The quotation comes at a time in the story when Huxley has already been killed and his death described, so it shows how Bradbury uses the omniscient narrator to emphasise the killer’s mental instability by jumping in time. This use of flashback helps to stress Acton’s paranoia and obsession with Huxley and his supposedly devious plan to get Acton caught. Thus, Bradbury uses third person narration to explore ideas of mania in Acton, and of his complete fixation with his victim.
This use of third person narration can help to build the suspense in The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl, by quickening the pace and making the murderer seem more unpredictable and manic in his actions and thoughts. However, Poe’s use of first person helps to build tension in a different way, because of the meticulous nature of the murderer’s actions, and indeed his pride in his painstaking attention to detail. He boasts to us about the slow, stealthy manner in which he carries out his murder, and this builds tension as Poe deliberately makes us frustrated and impatient with the murderer’s delay and over-description, so that our nerves are thinned ready for the burst of violence at the climax. Here Poe has an advantage over Bradbury, as this very particular character trait can only come across by having a character tell the story in their own way. This calculated infuriation can be seen towards the end of the story, when the young man is waiting to kill his older victim:
‘I resolved to open a little – a very, very little – crevice in the lantern. So I opened it – you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily – until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot out…’
This intentionally verbose description of what is really a reasonably insignificant moment in the story shows the way Poe uses his character’s boastful and meticulous nature to build the tension through his use of narrative voice – this gives him an advantage over Bradbury’s third person narration, which does not allow him to build suspense through his character’s attitude to storytelling and to his own actions.
Bradbury is effective in making his killer seem cold and impersonal through his use of third person narration. Poe’s killer may frighten us by his denial and his actions, but we cannot help, because of the very nature of first person narration, to form some type of emotional attachment to the character. With Acton, however, the cold, impersonal manner of Bradbury’s third person narration makes him seem all the more frightening and insane, adding to the horror of his actions. This is shown close to the start of the story, when Acton first begins to become obsessed with cleaning the house to remove all evidence of his having been there:
‘He polished the floor one yard from the body on all sides. Then he polished the floor two yards from the body on all sides. Then he polished the floor three yards from the body in all directions.’
This cold, objective, matter-of-fact style shows how Bradbury uses third person narration to accentuate the horror and coldness of Acton’s actions. It also serves to emphasise the sheer lunacy and illogicality of Acton’s obsession with cleanliness, as this blunt statement of the action highlights Acton’s irrational and slightly ridiculous fixation.
In conclusion to this section, I would say that both writers face advantages and challenges to the effectiveness of their use of narrative voice: Poe is limited as his character is not omniscient, though he is able to take us inside the mind of the young murderer, while Bradbury, although his omniscience allows him to accentuate the erratic mania of Acton, is restricted by the fact that he cannot show the true nature of Acton’s psychosis and his attitude to his actions and thoughts. Thus, Poe and Bradbury have made different choices with respects to narrative voice, and these choices have varying effectiveness.
Narrative Structure The two writers employ differing narrative structures to create an atmosphere of suspense and horror. In The Tell Tale Heart, Poe uses a somewhat untraditional structure to emphasise the highly volatile emotional state of the young man, and the fluctuating nature of his fortunes. Poe’s exposition reveals the idea of the murder of the old man. This may reduce the suspense somewhat, but it does place emphasis immediately on the insanity of the killer, by introducing him as a madman with the idea of murder already in his head, motivated by his hatred of his victim’s eye.
Poe then moves to the first crisis of the story, as the murderer waits and waits for the right moment, and describes his entry into the old man’s room. This builds the tension, given the previously mentioned scrupulous nature of the young man. Poe uses the crisis to have the murderer boast about the care he takes when planning and executing the murder, increasing our disturbance at his madness and
cold-heartedness.
This crisis leads to the climax of the death of the old man. Poe deliberately describes this in a sudden outburst of fast-paced violence, for several reasons. It provides an effective contrast with the slow, deliberate crisis – the build up to the murder. It also serves as an abrupt release from the unbearable tension that Poe has built up during the exposition and crisis. Finally, it shows the capricious nature of the murderer’s temperament, as he switches from the slow, laboured and detailed style of the exposition and crisis to a fast, breathless pace as the first crisis climaxes in the murder of the old man.
This section of the story has its resolution with the hiding of the old man’s body under the floorboards. Here, Poe uses narrative structure to give a sense of false conclusion, the falsity of which is hinted at only by the mention of the young man’s hallucinatory hearing of the dead man’s beating heart. This means that the following crisis and resolution have more resonance as they come after an apparent victory for the killer, who is eventually defeated by his own sense of guilt, represented by the beating heart – the life of the old man returning to haunt him, and brought out by the officers who come to investigate.
The story enters crisis again with the coming of the officers. Poe uses this technique to show how the young killer is being driven gradually mad by his own conscience, and he uses this second crisis to build the tension through the murderers increasing franticness and paranoia over whether the officers know of his guilt.
This crisis builds to a climax as the man begins to hear the beating of the heart again. Poe uses this form of narrative structure to bring the reader back to a previous concept, and increase tension and curiosity, as we know the beating heart must eventually be the man’s downfall. This is in contrast with the first climax, which was more about the release of tension than the building of it.
The tension is welling up inside the murderer as he struggles with his own insanity and paranoia, and it is released this time through the resolution of the story, as the killer finally gives in to the hallucinations and madness that he suffers, and confesses dramatically to the crime, paranoid and positive that the officers are aware that he has committed the crime. Poe again builds the pace in the climax and suddenly brings the action crashing down in an abrupt resolution, to emphasise how all the murderer’s meticulous plans come unstuck with rapid disaster.
Bradbury uses an untraditional narrative structure, by using the element of time and suggestions of a crisis, climax and resolution before the main story has even started.
The exposition is not at the beginning, as would be traditional, but is gradually revealed to us throughout the first half of the story through the use of flashback. This exposition is Acton’s arrival at the house and challenging of Huxley over his affair with Lily, Acton’s wife. Bradbury uses this form of exposition so that he can reveal the background to the murder after we know it has happened, thus increasing our curiosity and enhancing the sense of frenzied insanity surrounding this story.
There is, however, an exposition to the story as we see it, as Acton contemplates the body of Huxley, thinking of it as art. Bradbury uses this form of dual exposition to show Acton’s paranoia and obsession through narrative structure.
There is also a dual crisis – one crisis in flashback, one in actual time. The crisis which occurs in the flashback sequence is the beginning of the obsession on the part of Acton with having touched things in the house. He remembers a distorted picture of Huxley supposedly deliberately making Acton get his fingerprints on everything in order to incriminate him, in the knowledge that Acton was going to murder him. This somewhat preposterous suspicion becomes a fixation for Acton, and the basis for the crisis in flashback in this story. Bradbury uses narrative structure here to emphasise Acton’s growing mania.
The crisis in actual time is the period in which Acton finds gloves in a drawer in the house and begins to see fingerprints on various objects and surfaces, and clean frantically, hiding when the doorbell rings and beginning to hallucinate and becomes increasingly schizophrenic, arguing with himself over the actuality of the presence of fingerprints. Bradbury builds tension using an extended crisis in order to show the way Acton’s insanity grows throughout the story as he becomes increasingly paranoid.
There is a climax in both the flashback and in the actual time story. The flashback reaches climax when Huxley is killed. Even here, at this dramatic and violent climax, Bradbury has Acton paranoid and completely fixated on the idea that Huxley is trying to incriminate Acton for his murder – Acton insists that Huxley fell to the floor deliberately in order to get Acton to crawl on the floor and fingerprint it.
The crisis in actual time climaxes in the reference by Acton’s tormenting alter ego to Lady Macbeth’s line in Macbeth: ‘Out damned spot’. This reference to guilt and the irreversibility of actions will be discussed further in the language section, but here, suffice to say that Bradbury employs a dramatic and slightly ironic climax to Acton’s growing guilt – which is manifesting itself in the form of paranoia – in order to bring a memorable end to the drawn-out period in which Acton has been becoming more and more frenzied.
