Difference Between The Tell Tale Heart And The Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat both ‘include a self-defensive, insane murderer’, but expose the reader to the events of the texts by employing different narrative strategies. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe establishes an unstable narrator to play with the ideas of subjectivity and reality. Juxtaposing this, the narrative voice in The Black Cat initially portrays himself as a highly logical, preparing the reader to interpret the events he describes as factual. The Tell-Tale Heart distances the reader from events through the eerily logical language used in relation to the narrator’s decision to murder his neighbour, while The Black Cat shows a divide between the narrator’s presentation of accidentally revealing his murder …show more content…
The narrator depicts his confidence that his crime will not be discovered as the police explore his house. His mind is at ease as he describes, ‘at length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence.’ (Poe, p.237) The narrator’s claims his calm disposition is a result of the ‘inscrutability’ of the wall, illustrating a pivotal moment in the text, as the narrator’s crime could have gone undiscovered and he could have remained a ‘freeman’ (Poe, p. 237) However, he explains ‘and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.’ (Poe, p.238) This action is portrayed by the narrative voice as confidence in his act of concealment, but actually leads to the reveal of the crime. Susan Amper put forward the argument that ‘his subconscious drives him against his will to reveal the hiding place.’ If the reader is to understand this event as a compulsion of his subconscious, a change in vantage point is experienced regarding the self-betrayal the narrator exposes himself to, as the reader could interpret this as an act of guilt. The division between the accidental reveal of the crime and the suggestion that the narrator is overwhelmed by guilt is an example of this and leaves the narrator and the reader with different understandings of the motivation that led to the narrator being caught out. Therefore, the presence of a haunted doubleness in Poe’s tales supports this understanding, just as a gap appears between the narrator’s account in The Tell-Tale Heart and how the reader understands event, a gap appears in The Black Cat between how the narrative voice presents the