Comparing The Cask Of Amontillado And The Tell-Tale Heart

In both of Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” a murder is described in the eyes of the perpetrator. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the murderer kills an old man because he believed that the old man’s milky eye was evil, whereas in “The Cask of Amontillado” a murderer kills a man who had previously insulted him. Edgar Allan Poe utilizes the narrator’s disturbing point of view and the cynical tone to entertain the reader with a suspenseful and horrific story. To begin with, Edgar Allan Poe describes the murder in each of the short stories through the unreliable point of view of the perpetrator which gives insight of their twisted perspective enhancing the suspense of the story. When the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” enters the old man’s room to kill him, the narrator describes how, “but even yet I refrained and kept …show more content…
In, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe describes how “death approaching the old man had stalked with his black shadow before him, and the shadow had now reached and enveloped the victim” (2). Poe’s vivid description of the events leading up to the murder establishes a suspenseful and foreboding tone. By building up the suspense of the foreboding murder, Poe can easily entertain the reader. Edgar Allan Poe also implements this literary device in “The Cask of Amontillado”. As Montresor, the perpetrator, is burying Fortunato in the catacombs, he hears a “low moaning cry” followed with “a succession of loud and shrill screams” (5). Poe describes the murder of Fortunato in a traumatizing fashion by specifically providing a startling description of Fortunato’s screams. In this story, Poe entertains the reader by implementing a vivid sense of horror in the sensory detail of the characters. Edgar Allan Poe entertains the reader by conveying a sense of suspense and horror through the tone of the