...short stories: “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. At first glance they seem to have very little in common however, after reading and looking more closely, you will notice that they share some striking similarities. In this paper I will illustrate how Poe’s stories “The Tell-Tale Heat” and “The Black Cat” share striking similarities in both meaning, content and ultimately justice. As stated above, both stories share elements of murder and insanity. Both stories are also told by first person narrators who are in prison after being caught for the murders they committed. In “The Black Cat” when the narrator kills his wife and conceals her body in the wall. Similarly, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator kills the old man and conceals his body under the floor boards. The question is, what was Poe’s preoccupation with hiding bodies within the structure of a house? Was Poe a former carpenter/brick layer, thus making him imagine concealing the bodies in this manner? Did Poe have delusions of his own about someone hiding a body within the home? Was he himself guilty of a heinous crime and used his writing as an admission of guilt? Another theme in both stories is the murder of seemingly innocent victims and the obsession leading to the murders. In “The Black Cat” the obsession is a cat named Pluto. Although the narrator originally had no problem with Pluto, he would eventually be driven to cut out Pluto’s eye because Pluto angered him and all because the cat loved him. The narrator...
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...Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, much like many of his other stories, is a tale of inexplicable violence and perverseness, and yet it is an amazing insight into the mind’s ability to observe itself and even give itself away, as evidenced in end of the tale of the narrator. Indeed, even the narrator himself is aware of this fact that he is going insane somehow, and even with this knowledge and the knowledge that he continues to proceed in his insanity it’s not enough to stop his descent. The narrator takes time and details each aspect of his madness, in a sense observing his actions from a detached perspective, even though the story is written in the first person, like a psychiatrist. There is however a tinge of awareness and perhaps some sense of guilt in how the narrator conveys the story. Much of his actions make no sense and seem to have no logical intent, and perhaps that is what Poe tries to convey when the narrator describes and his actions in the word, “PERVERSENESS.” One interesting note is that the narrator defends himself in the very beginning with “Yet, mad am I not—” and yet he begins to logically process his reactions with, “have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me.” Thus, in the very act of saying he isn’t mad, and then by logically outlining his guilt, he shows his own descent into madness and his objectivity throughout the process, questioning whether the narrator feels guilty at all or not. After The Black Cat begins with the narrator’s description...
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