The Black Cat And The Tell Tale Heart Analysis

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Edgar Allan Poe often demonstrates madness in his short stories. Many times it comes from the first-person narrator. While the narrators are similar in the fact that they are both insane, they also have a lot of differences in the way that they are insane. A great way to compare the way the insanity differs in the narrators, is to compare two of Poe’s stories. Stories such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” do a good job showing the similarities and differences between the insanity in both of the stories, as well as the insanity in other short stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s. “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are both very similar stories. In both text the narrators are crazy and unreliable storytellers. The smallest thing always seems to unsettle them. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator claimed that it was the old man’s eye that vexed him (“The Tell-Tale Heart” 82). In “The Black Cat” the narrator took the cat’s eye because the cat was avoiding him and it made the man angry (“The Black Cat” 116). Another common thing these two stories share is love. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator said that he had loved the old man, but he just could not stand his eye (“The Tell-Tale Heart” 81). “The Black Cat” begins similarly, with the narrator claiming his love of animals and how he was especially fond of them (“The Black Cat” 115). One of the biggest things that they have in common is that their insanity drove them to murder. “The Tell-Tale Heart narrator was