Comparing The Black Cat And The Tell-Tale Heart By Edger Allen Poe

Fake! Attention seeking! These are some reactions toward the mentally ill people of today. From strangers to parents, some people still do not believe mental illnesses exist or pretend they do not. Some people still pass off mental illnesses as an act for attention or something that does not require treatment. This is an age-old ignorance in our society that continues to hinder mental health treatments. The gothic writer Edger Allen Poe saw the ignorance of mental health care in his time. In his works, “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe draws attention to the need for mental health care through the portrayal of the extreme harm that mental disorders can pose to others by utilizing unreliable narration and lack of guilt.
In “The

From the beginning of the short story, the narrator admits his alcoholism, stating that he frequently indulges in “Fiend Intemperance” which caused him to “[offer]…personal violence” to his wife and pets (“The Black Cat”). It has been noted that alcoholics are at risk to develop “compromised memory and cognition … emotional problems [that] cause conflict at work, home, or school” (“Alcoholism”). The protagonist displays these problems when he recounts that he killed his cat “because [he] knew that it had loved [him],” or that his new cat’s mark had slowly turned into an “image of…the GALLOWS” (“The Black Cat”). These are the evidence of the narrator’s compromised memory and cognition, which makes him an unreliable narrator. The readers cannot understand or ensure the occurrence of the protagonist’s actions and thoughts. Using unreliable narration, Poe displays how damaging mental illnesses are to one’s thought process. He is showing how some of the mentally ill cannot grasp their own abnormality; he is showing that they need outside intervention to prevent the escalation of

The critic Zimmerman notes the many similarities between the main character of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia such as hallucinations, narcissism, excessively emotional, and many more (279-280). Moments such as the protagonist hearing the old man’s heart “beating…louder, louder” even though he is physically too far from the old man on the bed to hear it, and hearing the heart when the old man was dead under the floor show that the main character suffers from auditory hallucinations (“The Tell-Tale Heart”). This tells the readers that the narrator is compromised. His narcissism and lack of guilt are shown when he praises himself for his carefulness in the murder, “would a madman have been so wise as this,” and when he, “in the wild audacity of [his] perfect triumph,” places his seat on “the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim” while talking with the cops (“The Tell-Tale Heart). These points in the story prove to the readers that the protagonist is unreliable and very much insane, even though he tries his hardest to claim the opposite. By insinuating that the main character has an auditory hallucination, Poe makes sure the reader knows that the main character is not insane, just because he is a killer, but because he is suffering from a serious mental illness that caused him to kill. The main character’s claim of