Edgar Allan Poe is often considered to be the father of the modern horror story, as he is most known for exploring the dark and often irrational side of the human mind. Although an iconic figure in poetry today, his life was filled with personal tragedy and professional failure, and numerous women whom he loved died, most from tuberculosis. Poe had a low tolerance for alcohol, and drank to escape his failure and pain that had constantly reoccurred throughout his life. As a result, all of his works share characteristics of Gothic fiction, which include themes such as mystery, horror, the grotesque, violence, the supernatural, murder, death, suicide, and many other dark themes. While Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” share common themes such as the description of an eye, the killing of the living thing possessing so-called “evil eye”, the
…show more content…
If these were told in a third person omniscient point of view, then it would not have been nearly as twisted as it was originally told which is in first person perspective. First person point of view is often regarded as being biased since the reader is only seeing the story through the eyes of one character. On the contrary, this point of view allows the reader to understand the narrator’s emotions, thought process, and in this case, psychological state. In “The Black Cat” he states, “I neither expect nor solicit belief…Yet mad am I not” (Poe 1). He is stating that he does not expect the reader to believe what he is about to tell them and that he not crazy. Similarly he states in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “but why will you say that I am mad?...How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily –how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe 1). At the beginning of both stories it is clear that the narrator is a lunatic. He attempts to convince the reader that he is not crazy by repeating that he is not
If these were told in a third person omniscient point of view, then it would not have been nearly as twisted as it was originally told which is in first person perspective. First person point of view is often regarded as being biased since the reader is only seeing the story through the eyes of one character. On the contrary, this point of view allows the reader to understand the narrator’s emotions, thought process, and in this case, psychological state. In “The Black Cat” he states, “I neither expect nor solicit belief…Yet mad am I not” (Poe 1). He is stating that he does not expect the reader to believe what he is about to tell them and that he not crazy. Similarly he states in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “but why will you say that I am mad?...How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily –how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe 1). At the beginning of both stories it is clear that the narrator is a lunatic. He attempts to convince the reader that he is not crazy by repeating that he is not