In the short story “The Black Cat” and the short story “The Birthmark,” both main characters are similar to each other, but they also have differences. Each story grapples with sanity/insanity, how the main characters treat those around them, and each character's attitude towards life. Even with these similarities, the stories are different. The authors of these two stories, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, are both writers who use madness and gothic often, but in different ways. In these stories, readers see how each writer uses madness and gothic in a creative and unusual way. “The Black Cat” and “The Birthmark” address the same topics, but each in ways that are different than the other. In these two short stories, both characters seem to be sane at the beginning of the story, but by the end, readers see they are insane. However, Poe and Hawthorne choose to …show more content…
In both stories, the two characters portray themselves as protagonists in the beginning, middle, and end of the stories, even when readers clearly see they are insane. Each character portrays himself as a good person, and they each downplay their insanity, but they reveal themselves to be insane in different ways. Both characters have a different type of insanity: The narrator from “The Black Cat” has a violent disposition, and readers can tell that he is an unstable character, while Aylmer from “The Birthmark” seems to be a person who wants to remove one birthmark, but later, becomes obsessed with the birthmark and the birthmark only. These two characters are also different in terms of insanity. Even though Aylmer and the narrator portray themselves as good people in the beginning of the stories,