The Black Cat And The Tell Tale Heart Analysis

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The Black Cat & The The Tell-Tale Heart Madness and obsession were major themes of stories in the 19th century. One of the authors that strictly emphasized these themes was the American author Edgar Allan Poe. His works mainly focused on murder, death and fantasy while the theme of horror is often visited throughout his work. The two stories that present these themes visibally of Poe’s stories are the Black cat and the Tell-Tale heart. Both these stories share insanity, death and murder as themes while also carrying many similar literary elements like symbolism and narration. Edgar Allan Poe 's use of the unnamed narrator in his stories, The Black Cat and The Tell-tale Heart, creates the effect of unreliability in the main characters. From a first glance however, one will notice that the main character’s in these stories have very little in common. In spite of these differences, the stories still very remain similar. The Black cat and the Tell-Tale heart both share common themes. The most important of these are death and insanity. Both characters claim their lack of insanity and simultaneously depict the actions of insanity. This explicitly creates irony in both stories and in the same manner illustrates to us the unreliability of the narrators. In addition, the idea of Supernatural events, insignificant they may seem, also contributes to the story 's overall theme. Both narrators face a supernatural event. In case of The Black Cat, the narrator’s house burns, whereas in