The Black Cat And The Tell Tale Heart Essay

Deadly Sins of a Heartbeat and a Cat People always think of murder being something that happens out in the open, and isn’t planned but that is not always the case. It always happens that they think that murder is a justification of getting revenge or picking someone at random, but that too is also wrong. Murder doesn’t have to be planned and it doesn’t need to be out in the open to be considered a crime. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allan Poe describes this case very well. These two short stories help readers understand that not everything has to be planned accordingly or done in public. The guilt starts to rise, and soon it is discovered how both narrators in both stories start to lose their sanity. “The Tell-Tale …show more content…
Both narrators feel like they are having some sort of hallucinations happen to them in which one narrator feels he sees the cat everywhere he goes and the other narrator feels he hears the thumping of the dead man’s heartbeat. Both narrators end up being caught by the police and are confined in jail except the narrator in “The Black Cat” is about to be executed and the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is writing his story to prove he’s not insane. Some minor differences between them is that in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator is not married and lives with an old man whom he carefully plans to smother and hide underneath the floorboards of the room and in “The Black Cat” the narrator is married and it’s his wife whom he murders with an axe but it was an unplanned murder. The narrators indicate some kind of mental disorder in the process. According to Dr. Hellerstein, “When people present in a kind of rapid onset of a psychotic state that hasn’t been noticed before and that seems to come out of the blue, in retrospect there is usually some clinical prodrome” (Petersen, Why does a person suddenly lose it?). Both narrators seems to be experiencing some type of mental disorder that makes them lose their