Tell-Tale Heart Compare Contrast Essay

In the stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, both narrators realize their acts were wrong, but they did them anyway by rationalizing that they were driven by circumstance.The Tell-Tale Heart is about a mad man who truly believes he is not crazy by telling us the whole story. He deeply loves his roomate but his blind eye became a nusiance to him and he couldn’t stand it no more and he had to do something about it. He ended up killing him so perfectly no one whould know, but the guilt ate him up and he amited he had done the deed to the police. Similarly, The Black Cat is about another insane man who drowns his sorrows with achocl and is so confident with himeself.He finds himself on deathroe because of his bizzare action, such as killing

The author develops this theme by using first person narration and symbolism.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe presents the reader with an unreliable narrator that adds to the theme. The narrator tries to prove his is not maniacal but ends up leaving us thinking he is more manical than ever. In the begining of the story the narrator goes on about how he is not carzy and you have to listen to the whole story. It states “TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” The narrator seems very unstable and seems realiable that he has to get your reproval of him not being demented. The evil eye is annoying the heck out of the narrator he let his anger get the best of him, which led him to killing the old man, “ But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eve. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the

Similarly in The Black Cat, the narrator writes from a first person perspective, and likewise tells the reader that he is not “mad.” The openging of the “Black Cat” starts out by him adressing the fact that he on deathroe but the whole situtation is completly a misunderstanding and wants to prove you wrong; when you start to begin to think he is