Comparing Tell-Tale Heart And The Black Cat

Poe is known for his spine chilling stories of which all have the same genre of horror. Both of Poe’s stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, display a person with a psychotic personality. In both of these stories the narrator let’s his aggravations get the best of him and persuade him to kill. Both narrators kill someone they love because of their insane thoughts. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator loves the old man and doesn’t want to kill him but believes that he has to because of the old man’s evil eye. As the narrator states,”I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!—yes, it was this!” (691). Here he explains that all the actions he took were because of the eye.

The narrator tries to kill his black cat with an axe and his wife intervenes and offsets his thoughts and he accidently kills her. In both the stories the narrators killed someone they loved and although they loved them they don’t feel bad about hiding the body successfully as they thought. In Poe’s other story, The Cask of Amontillado, the genre is also one of horror. The narrator in this story also displays a psychotic personality as he happily tells the story of a murder he committed. However, the narrator didn’t love the man named Fortunato that he killed and even had a history with him. But the way the narrator killed Fortunato was just as shocking as the murders in The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. The narrator chains Fortunato in an upright casket and bricks him in. One main similarity that the narrator’s story has to the others is that he basically gets away with the