Similarities And Differences Between The Black Cat And The Tell Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe often demonstrates a type of madness in his short stories. Many times it comes from the first-person narrator. While the narrators are similar in the fact that they are both insane, they also have a lot of differences in the way that they are insane. A great way to compare the way the insanity differs in the narrators, is to compare two of Poe’s stories. Stories such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” do a good job showing the similarities and differences between the insanity in both of the stories, as well as the insanity in other short stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s. “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are both very similar stories. In both texts the narrators are crazy and unreliable storytellers. The smallest …show more content…
In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator claims that he is not crazy, but in “The Black Cat” the narrator says that he does not expect the readers to believe his story (“The Tell-Tale Heart” 81)(“The Black Cat” 115). The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems to always have been a little unhinged. Whereas, in “The Black Cat”, he seems sane in the beginning. “The Tell-Tale Heart” has a constant madness to it. The narrator is just crazy and does not really know it. In “The Black Cat” though, the madness is brought on with alcohol and rage. The character is slowly going mad, but is helpless to stop it. The narrator in “The Black Cat” goes into sudden bouts of violence. When the cat almost tripped him, he went into a rage and tried to kill it, but his wife tried to stop him and became the victim of his fury (“The Black Cat” 120). “The Black Cat”s narrator’s madness is instant and wild, unlike the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, who is meticulous and cautious about his planning. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” had planned the murder for a week before following through (“The Tell-Tale Heart” 81). The two narrators may both be crazy, but it is not in the same way. Even though the narrators are not exactly alike, they do have things in common with themselves and with other narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s …show more content…
Short stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s often have similar attributes, like being insane. For example, in “The Cask of Amontillado” he is also a murderer. His style of murder thought is more closely related to “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrator than to the narrator of “The Black Cat”. In both “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” the murder is planned. Though “The Cask of Amontillado” is also different from both the other stories. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” the narrators are caught with the murder, but in “The Cask of Amontillado” he is not caught. One of the more contrasting stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s is “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Although this narrator is also unreliable, it is because of different reasons. This narrator has been drugged and is the one that is supposed to be killed. Even though readers cannot take his word because he has been drugged, he does not seem to be unhinged like the narrators in the other stories. “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” may not be similar to all other stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s, but they can be easily