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Insanity In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Black Cat

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Thoughts of insanity and death have haunted minds everywhere at some point or another. What defines “sanity”? Why isn’t death fair? How much time do we have? Edgar Allan Poe ponders these questions, as well. Two similar short stories by Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, each have unreliable narrators recounting their crimes and trying to prove their “sanity” to the reader, though in doing so, they appear very unstable. Time eventually catches up and causes their "insanity" to reach its breaking point, and they expose themselves. Eerie stories such as “Ligeia” and “Morella” investigate how escaping time and consequently death, doesn’t feel right. Poe explores another aspect of time’s bite (injustice?) in the poem “Annabel Lee” …show more content…

The narrator of “The Black Cat” saying that while recounting the story his “...immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.(531)” He so clearly attempts to downplay a story in which he abuses and murders animals and killed his wife, signaling serious mental issues. Hurting a fellow human is seen as one thing, still horrible, but hurting a household pet, who has no chance of truly fighting back, is another aspect of horror. The narrator abusing Pluto—the first cat the owner has—is him trying to fight his impending madness (Shulman 256). This doesn’t seem to work, so he hangs the cat. The fire that happens after, leaving an imprint of the murdered cat haunts him further; the second cat’s birthmark which appears to the narrator to be changing takes it to the narrators final attempt to purge his demons. This final attempt is him killing his wife. This of course doesn’t work, because time brings the truth of his mental state to life, when he contributes to his downfall by knocking on the wood paneling that hides his wife’s body. The second cat meows giving his crimes away to the police. The narrator’s urge to get the last “word” in was time not letting him getting away. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” had a similar urge which led him to seating the officers over the floor board hiding the body. This narrator’s breakdown was a more apparent version of unstable tendencies giving away their crimes. For both narrators their “insanity” was catching up, dragging their crimes along with

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“The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843, shows the mental deterioration of an unnamed narrator. Similarly, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, although written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman almost fifty years later, also centers around an unnamed narrator who is mentally devolving. Accordingly, certain aspects of the narrator’s surroundings cause this degradation. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” these effects originate from the wallpaper in her room. Equivalently, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” they arise equally from the eye and the heart of the old man, the narrator's neighbor whom he murders.

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“The Tell-Tale Heart” vs. “The Black Cat” “I was never insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” This quote from Edgar Allan Poe portrays the plot in both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” precisely. Both of these tales bring you into the mind of two fascinating narrators. These ghastly short stories written by Poe in the 1840’s are quite different, but they share striking similarities. “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are similar in several ways.

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Next, Poe develops suspense in the black cat through the hanging of Pluto. The narrator is unbalanced and insane, yet hangs Pluto with full intent by the limb of a tree. The narrator states, Quote 1 “hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes with the bitterest remorse at my heart” (Poe 2). The violence that the narrator displays with the hanging of Pluto enroots anxiety for the perusal to know.

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The narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.

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Both cats are abnormally large, black, missing an eye, and extremely “sagacious (64).” The only notable difference being the white spot on the second cat’s chest, which eventually turns into gallows, reminding the narrator of how he brutally killed the first cat. The cats name, Pluto, is a reference to the Greek god of death, representing just how uncontrollable the second cat is. The earlier cat’s innocence likeability allows it to be the victim of the narrator’s actions, as it represents the forced submission of women, slave, and child to man. The second cat, on the other hand has an annoying, almost omnipresent nature, allowing it to exercise complete psychological control over the main character.

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of criminal insanity, the first-person narrators confess unsound confessions. They control the narrative, and we can only see through their eyes. However, they do describe their own pathological or psychological actions so conscientiously that they exhibit their own insanity. They are usually incapable of stepping back from their narratives to detect their own madness. The narrator 's’ fluency is meticulous and often opulent.

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Obsession, internal conflict, and underlying guilt are all aspects of being human but when it’s associated with paranoia and insanity it may be just the recipe for the perfect crime as perceived by Edger Allan Poe in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Poe uses this as one of his shortest stories to discuss and provide an insight into the mind of the mentally ill, paranoia and the stages of mental detrition. The story 's action is depicted through the eyes of the unnamed delusional narrator. The other main character in the story is an old man whom the narrator apparently works for and resides in his house. The story opens off with the narrator trying to assure his sanity then proceeding to tell the tale of his crime, this shows a man deranged and hunted with a guilty conscience of his murderous act.

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