The Tell Tale Heart And The Black Cat Comparative Essay

The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe are two of the most common examples given of stories told from the point of view of unreliable narrators. The main reason for this unreliability is the fact that both narrators are emphasized to suffer from some sort of mental ailment and commit heinous acts as a result, with the narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart killing an old man and the narrator of The Black Cat killing his wife and his cat Pluto. However, they both have their differences in motives and the seeming lack of comprehensive details as to how and why they’ve been driven to violence. With all of these details laid out, there are two themes covered substantially throughout both of the stories; superstition and guilt. A theme

The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart hears the heart of the old man he murdered through his floor, and The Black Cat’s narrator hears the screeches of the other cat in the closet where his wife’s corpse was hidden. Both confess their acts to the police, and display a striking amount of vulnerability and helplessness as compared to the beginning of their stories. Even before they confess their acts after their immense amount of guilt overpowers them, they both express a surprising amount of arrogance to the police. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart welcomes the cops right after killing the old man and hiding him under the floorboards, remarking that “I smiled, —for what had I to fear?” and invited them to “search well”. Meanwhile in The Black Cat, when the police visit his house, the narrator recalls that he “felt no embarrassment whatsoever” and that his “heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence”. These prideful feelings are promptly broken from the sounds of a screeching cat from the walls where the narrator’s wife was hidden, revealing the narrator’s other supposedly dead cat and his wife’s corpse. The Tell-Tale Heart does the same thing except with the narrator hallucinating the old man’s beating heart through the floorboards. Even considering these differences, both stories make sure to have guilt backfire on their respective