The Past Doesn't Bury Itself

The Past Doesn't Bury Itself

Caitlin Dill
Honors English 11/ 6th hour
November 3, 2008
D.H. Larence once wrote “the past doesn’t bury itself, instead it sits, waiting to be admired by the present.” This quote holds true in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Telltale Heart by reminding the narrator of the past. In other words, the quote means that the past doesn’t hide itself from those living in the now, it only waits for someone to acknowledge it and remember what it was worth. In agreement with this quote, if we do not remember the past it will wait for the people of today for too long and they will be doomed to forget it forever. Larence’s quote is supported by occurrences in Poe’s short story. The narrator’s past guilt returns to haunt him after killing the old man by “admitting the deed” in which he has committed. While the police officers are chatting in the old man’s house, it doesn’t take long for the narrator to remember what he has done. The “beating” of the old man’s heart rings through his ears as the narrator begins to wonder if “they heard—they suspected—they knew.” The past also occurs in the repeating of the narrator’s routine of watching the old man while he slept everyday before the night he killed him. He would “every night, about midnight, turn the late of his door and opened it” with a dark lantern and wait for the eye to open. In no time at all, the narrator’s past, though brief, catching up with him and he goes insane from the man’s heart. The connection between both the quote and the short story is that the narrator could not simply hide his past, the crime, away forever and that it would come back for him.

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