I Felt A Funeral In My Brain And The Tell Tale Heart Comparison

Gothic literature is full of madness in different styles. For example, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, or “I Felt a Funeral, In my Brain” written by Emily Dickinson. Both of these pieces of literature where the narrators are in a state of madness. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. In the story the narrator is uncomfortable with an old man with an “evil” eye, resulting in the narrator killing him. The narrator is then attacked by his own brain when he starts hearing this fictional heartbeat of the dead man. “I Felt a Funeral, In my Brain” is a poem by Emily Dickinson. In this poem a woman is “living” her own funeral. She experiences her entire funeral even though she’s dead. “The Tell-Tale Heart'' is a better

For example, Emily Dickinson says “And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down - And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then -.” These sentences describe someone who is having a mental breakdown. It is more of how the person is intaking stress rather than conforming into madness. The character seems to be going through alternate dimensions plopping on different earths and realities trying to find a new one she belongs in. Dickinson does not use the highlights of gothic literature in this poem. On the contrary, Edgar Allen Poe makes his charchter portray madness so blatantly. In “The Tale-Tell Heart” the narrator shows he is mad by saying things like “And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.” This paragraph shows the mental state of the narrator by watching how he tries to justify his madness by using something ridiculars that sane people would not say. The narrator is succumbing to a mental state that does not benefit anyone, not even himself. At the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator turns himself in for the

So many popular gothic tales such as “Frankenstein” have violence everywhere. In “ The Tell-Tale Heart” Poe uses violence throughout it. The most obvious portrait of violence is when the narrator kills the old man. The narrator says this “I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But for many minutes the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead.” The narrator is feeling a sense of happiness while taking someone’s life. Poe also describes what he does to the body after he kills it to make everything seem more gory. But in “I Felt a Funeral,In my Brain” Dickinson does not really use much violence in the poem. The poem follows what seems to be a funeral, yet no violence really comes up. The most violent part is when the narrator says “And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum - Kept beating - beating - till I thought My mind was going numb -.” This sentence does not really capture the element of violence like other gothic tales such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” does. It uses words like beating and the phrase of her mind going numb to bring a sense of death being near but does not fully captivate that feeling like other stories