Comparing Guilt In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Black Cat

In Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, the narrators both reveal their crimes to the police through over-confidence and guilt. Both unreliable, you cannot always believe what they say. The narrators’ arrogance and guilt allow then to reveal their crimes to the police and their true evil selves to the world. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator kills his wife out of anger for the second cat. While she is protecting the cat, he takes an ax to her brain. The police arrive and they investigate for the missing wife, but they cannot find her, so the narrator passes their inspection. The narrator is very confident in himself for his “master work” of hiding the body that he boasts, “‘These walls-are you going?-these walls are solidly put together.’ And here in sort of a while boasting I wrapped my upon the very brickwork that hid the corpse of my wife” (66).

The sound comes from the second cat, who is in the wall with the wife. The cat represents his conscience which gets the narrator in the end. Similarly, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator kills an innocent old man because of his belief of his “evil” eye. The eye symbolizes an all knowing all seeing quality that can see the narrator’s true evil which he is trying to hide from the world. He kills the old man and places the corpse under the floorboard of the old man’s bedroom. Similarly to “The Black Cat”, the narrator passes the police’s inspection and lets his confidence get to the better of him and invite the police into the room that houses the old man’s corpse. The narrator hears the old man’s heartbeat in his head, which is caused by his guilt, and he slips to insanity, and at its peak, the narrator exclaims,”’ I admit the deed! – tear up the