Similarities Between The Black Cat And The Cask Of Amontillado

The Doubles that Shape the Characters Identities Crazy. Unstable. Cunning. These are just a few words that describe Edgar Allan Poe's characters in, “The Tell-Tale Heart, '' “The Black Cat, '' and “The Cask of Amontillado." “The Black Cat” is about a gentleman becoming addicted to alcohol, which causes his docile disposition to change to one of more aggression. He hurts those around him that he loves, including his black cat Pluto, whom he murders as an act of mercy. The narrator becomes haunted by this, causing him to make questionable choices, leading to his death. "The Tell-Tale Heart,” is about a butler who hates an old man with a pale blue eye. The butler stalks the old man and eventually kills him; ridding his world of the evil eye

The butler is telling his story of when he kills an old man, his master, whom he loves, since he hates his eye. The butler saw it as an evil that needed to be eliminated. So he stalked the old man in his sleep for seven nights and shined a light on his eye, hoping to catch it open and kill the old man to get rid of the eye. On the eighth night, though, the old man heard him, and when the butler shines the light on his eye, he finds it is “open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed upon it”(Poe). Then he killed the old man, and afterward the narrator blankly states, “There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more”(Poe). Whenever the eye was open the narrator felt an insurmountable amount of anger, and with that, the need to get rid of the eye increased. However, when the eye was closed the butler felt calm. These two opposite feelings paint the narrator as insane, since he gets angry over such a small object as an eye. No sane person would get angry over an eye, nonetheless kill due to it. The butler says, “His eye would trouble me no more”(Poe) as if the eye was committing horrible crimes against him, but it was not; it was just existing. And when he gets rid of the eye a feeling of peace and content washes over him, knowing that the evil tainting his world is gone. The butler's shifting personality feeds his insane behavior; results in him making regrettable