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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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