Essay Comparing The Tell Tale Heart And The Black Cat

“The Black Cat” & “The Tell Tale Heart” Edgar Allan Poe’s well known short story, “The Black Cat” is a story about an alcoholic man with violent tendencies. He tortures, and ultimately kills, his beloved cat. His new cat drives him even more crazy and in the end he ends up killing his wife out of anger. In another work, “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrator kills an old man. He kills this old man because he doesn’t like his “vulture” eye. Poe's short stories all have similar and different aspects in that they talk about an insane narrator murdering someone he loved in different ways. In both “The Black Cat” and “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrators murder because they did not like something in the story. Both were driven to murder out of anger or dislike. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator killed his beloved wife out of anger. He tried to kill his new cat with an axe, but his wife had stopped him. “Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demonical, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain,” he had so much anger from the cat, that when his wife tried to stop him he killed her instead. The narrator in “The Tell

The cat in “The Black Cat” makes a noise in the wall as the police are leaving his home, “...by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhumane- a howl- a wailing shriek…” After they all hear the cat, the police knock the wall down and the cat jumps out. After the narrator kills the old man, chops him up, and put him in the floor in “The Tell Tale Heart” he hears the mans heartbeat through the floor. “It was the beating of the old man’s heart. I tried to stand quietly. But the sound ground louder. The old man’s fear must have been great indeed.” he thinks the police can hear the beating too, so he