Compare And Contrast The Tell Tale Heart And The Black Cat

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“The Tell-Tale Heart” vs. “The Black Cat” “I was never insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” This quote from Edgar Allan Poe portrays the plot in both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” precisely. Both of these tales bring you into the mind of two fascinating narrators. These ghastly short stories written by Poe in the 1840’s are quite different, but they share striking similarities. “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are similar in several ways. One comparison is that both narrators’ victims were people whom they cared about and loved immensely. In “The Black Cat,” the writer kills his wife only because she gets in the way while he is trying to harm the cat. The text states, “...this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain.” This sentence from the story shows how furious the writer was. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the writer kills the man because of his “vulture eye.” The writer states, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me.” This piece of evidence from the text shows that the writer had nothing against this man whom he loved. Another similarity of these tales is that both writers had prodigious confidence that the bodies of whom they had killed would not be discovered. It is described by both writers in the stories that they welcomed the police into their homes. Neither of the narrators