Comparing Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart And The Black Cat

Many people know who Edgar Allen Poe is, the astonishingly dark writer who wrote of insanity and death. Edgar Allen wrote dark stories, but his life was equally gloomy. He grew up fatherless and his mom died of tuberculosis when he was two. His foster mother also died of tuberculosis along with his first love. This quarter, we read two of Poe's stories, “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”. Both of these stories have characters who killed a loved one or someone close to them. What is different between the two stories is in “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrator’s insanity caused him to kill while while the narrator in “The Black Cat” killed because of rage. I would argue that the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” has the most distorted sense of reality of the two narrators because the impact of the old man’s vulture eye on himself and his hallucinations of hearing the heartbeat of the person he killed are more extreme than an alcoholic man thinking a cat put a curse on him after his house burned down. I believe the insane acts of the narrator of “The Black Cat” are driven by alcohol, guilt, rage. In the “Black Cat,” the narrator, who used to be a nice man, started to drink. In a drunken rage, …show more content…
The first time he heard the old man's heartbeat was on the eighth night, right before he killed him. The other time was when the policemen had finished searching the house and were talking to one another. The text states, “… the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!” He was insane because he thought that he heard the heartbeat of a dead man that he killed. I think that the narrator heard the heartbeat because he felt guilty for the terrible deed he