Comparison Of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

Comparison of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” Edgar Allan Poe is also well known for writing gothic literature, which is found in the majority of his writing. In class, we read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and after reading “The Black Cat” I noticed that it has many similar aspects, and has a lot in common. Both stories show the main character getting crazier as the story goes on, and they both present an unreliable narrator. The “The Tell-Tale Heart” as well as “The Black Cat” there are unusual deaths that were commited by the main character, and the characters claims they are not mad. Also, both stories end in guilt overcoming them and they both end up giving themselves away to the police.

In “The Tell-Tale-Heart” The main character seems get crazier as the story goes on, for example the longer the old man with the strange eye lives the more the main character wants to kill him, and everything he does starts to bug him more. This event is also

For example In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the main character starts off his story by saying “true! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” ( Poe 715). Additionally, In “The Black Cat” the main character also began his story saying he is not bad by saying “For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream”( Poe 718). Both stories begin in the same way, just worded