Comparing I Felt A Funeral, In My Heart And The Tell-Tale Heart

Dickinson's poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” they both have a connection with insanity or madness. Dickinson’s poem has two meanings, a literal meaning and a figurative meaning. The literal meaning is the process of the funeral, the figurative meaning is the speaker losing awareness and sanity. Poe’s short story is about insanity that turns into a deeper meaning, that is obsession with getting rid of something, that gets progressively worse as the story goes on. The narrator and the speaker’s sanity deteriorates overtime. Although the speaker is aware and accepts her loss of insanity the narrator denies his loss of insanity. In both texts they use excessive amounts of commas and dashes through

Although the speaker and the narrator have similar central ideas they also have different meanings of the central idea.
Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” both have the central idea of insanity that deteriorates overtime. While both of the texts central idea is loss of insanity the narrator in Poe’s short story denies the fact he is insane and the speaker in Dickinson’s poem realizes that they are losing their sanity and accepts the fact that it continues to deteriorate. Both of the texts talk about the general insanity of the narrator and the speaker. From the start of Poe’s short story you could easily acknowledge that the narrator was mentally unstable while he tells the story. “Above all the sense of hearing acute, I heard things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell” (Poe 1). The narrator portrays to the readers that he is insane because sane people can not hear things in their head. The narrator claims that he can hear voices from heaven and hell but no sane person can hear voices in their head, especially from heaven and hell, that proves furthermore that the narrator is genuinely insane. In Dickinson’s poem the speaker shows a loss of sanity throughout the whole poem, “My mind was going numb-” (Dickinson 8). The

However Dickinson never ends her thoughts to show that the speaker is losing awareness and sanity and never stopping thoughts throughout the whole poem. While Poe uses question marks, periods and exclamation points to show emotion that represents the narrator's madness. Poe uses unnecessary commas to pause his thoughts when he writes “And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of this door and opened it-oh so gently!” (Poe 3). When Poe uses dashes and commas to show that the narrator is emphasizing and elaborating on how stealthy he thinks he's being when the readers know that it's truly insane. Dickinson also uses excessive commas through the whole poem “And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked solitary here-” (Dickinson 15-16). Dickinson never uses punctuation to end a thought she always pauses and connects with dashes and commas. The readers can tell that the speaker is losing their sanity because the speaker is rattling and not stopping to end their thought. Although Dickinson and Poe’s text style are the same they both use it differently to portray the loss of sanity. Poe uses punctuation to end the narrator's thought and show emotion. “It is the beating of his hideous heart!” (Poe 18). Poe uses an exclamation point to show his increasing