Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” both introduce a crazed man driven to kill because of things as simple as an eye or a cat. In “The Black Cat,” a man who once loved animals attempts to kill his cat but instead murders his wife in the process. Police come to investigate and find the dead wife and the cat, still alive, buried in the wall. Similarly, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the main character decides to murder an old man he takes care of because of his vulture eye. The main character hears the “heartbeat” of the old man through the floorboards while the police are investigating. The sound eventually drives him to confess to them. The eye of the old man was his source of grief this time, however, in “The Black Cat” the cat’s affection is where the main character’s madness originated from. In both stories, the main character slaughters those they love to rid themselves of an nuisance. Poe illustrates a theme of death through his use of deranged characters, unsettling action, and …show more content…
Just by analyzing the characters, the reader sees how death constantly shines in “The Black Cat.” The main character is an animal lover; however, it is his pet, a black cat named Pluto, that drives him insane. He first cuts his cat’s eye out, then hangs Pluto in the garden. A cat strangely similar to Pluto appears back in the main character's life that drives him to insanity and, in a blind rage, causes the main character to kill his wife. From the quote “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket,” the reader sees how truly mad he is. In Western culture, black cats are evil and wicked omens. This is presented in the story by the author’s making the cat the main character’s main source of problems. The way Poe uses his characters is vital in presenting a theme of death in his
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” murders an elderly man because he is fearful of the man’s “evil eye.” “He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe 37). The narrator explains that he is haunted by the man’s eye and the only way to
Edgar Allan Poe is known for some of the most horrifying stories ever written through out time. He worked with the natural world, animals, and weather to create chilling literature. Two most notable thrillers are “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Poe was infatuated with death, disfigurement, and dark characteristics of the world. He could mix characters, setting, theme,and mood in a way that readers are automatically drawn into reading. Both of these short stories have the same major aspects in common.
Poe was a literary master with the emotions of his readers. He could make a reader feel anything he wanted to with just a few sentences. Through the stories 'The Black Cat'; and 'The Tell-Tale Heart';, he takes the reader through the emotions of his characters using writing methods that draw the reader in. His use of sentence structure and writing style allows the reader to become intimate with the character. Poe knew how the get a reader deep into the story; he could make them believe as thought they went through the deeds with the character. It is how Poe accomplishes this feat that is very interesting topic.
Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.
A common theme that is seen throughout many of Edgar Allan Poe’s text, is madness. Madness that will make the whole world turn upside down and around again. Madness that takes over somebody’s life. Madness and eye imagery is present in both “The Black Cat” and “The Tell Tale Heart” by Poe where madness is at first a fairy tale but then ends with a crash back to reality.Both stories share components of murder and insanity, and are very similar, not at first glance but if looked at more closely.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote that the single effect was the most important aspect of a short story, which everything must contribute to this effect. Poe’s gothic tale “The Black Cat” was written trying to achieve an effect of shocking insanity. In this first person narrative the narrator tells of his decline from sanity to madness, all because of an obsession with two (or possibly one) black cats. These ebony creatures finally drive him to take the life his wife, whose death he unsuccessfully tries to conceal.
A Comparison of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet and writer who is regarded as a master of the macabre, focusing on the horror genre with themes of death and insanity being explored throughout his work. Many traits of his main characters, such as the alcohol abuse of the protagonist in The Black Cat are borrowed from his own experiences, with the demons of drugs and alcohol eventually driving Poe to his death. His stories in general share the social setting of his own life, which was east-coast America in the mid-1800s, when at the time the distinct stoicism of the Victorian era was prevalent and insanity was a taboo subject - people who displayed an unstable state of mind were locked away and treated as outcasts. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat have many similarities, including these two men who throughtout their stories attempt to rationalise their respective downfalls , but instead show how terribly insane they are, letting the reader make their own observation of their mental disintegration.
The two short stories that I have chosen by Edgar Allan Poe are The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat. These two stories in particular have many things in common as far as technique goes, but they do have some significant differences between the two. In this paper I will try to compare and contrast these two short stories and hopefully bring something to the readers attention that wasn't there at first.
Tell-Tale Heart, written by Edgar Allan Poe, depicts the inner conflict of a murderer as he retells his story of how he came to kill the old man as a means to prove his sanity. The story is told in the point of view of an unreliable narrator, of whom is greatly disturbed by the eye of a geriatric man. The eye in question is described as evil, irritating the narrator beyond his comprehension, to the point when he has no choice but to get rid of the vexation by destroying the eye. This short story is similar to The Black Cat, of which is also penned by Poe. In The Black Cat, the narrator, albeit unreliable, describes his wrongdoings to the reader. He tells his story of how he murdered his wife, killed one of the two cats, and trapped the other
Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. The entire story is a confession of a brutal murder with no rational motive. The narrator repeatedly tries to convince the audience he hasn’t gone mad though his actions prove otherwise. To him his nervousness sharpens his senses and allows him to hear things from heaven Earth and hell. The narrator planned to kill his roommate whom had never wronged him and had loved dearly because he felt his pale blue eye was tormenting him. The narrator claims “his eye resembles that of a vulture.” The madman then goes on to explain how when the eye is on him his blood turns cold, and he has to get rid of the eye forever. He sneaks into his roommate’s room for seven nights at midnights and shines a beam of light from a lantern over the eye to find it closed. On the eighth night he repeats the same steps to find that this time the eye is open! The roommate senses someone’s presence and is alarmed. The narrator says that he knew his roommate was frightened because he could hear his heartbeat and had recognized that feeling of being scared. The narrator then attacks the man pushes him onto the floor and tosses the bed on top of him and kills him instantly. The narrator dismembers the body and places the pieces under the floorboards of the house. While doing this he’s amused with himself and what he has done. Moments later the police knock on the door because a neighbor has complained about the noise and heard someone shriek. The narrator says the shrieks came from him, but calmly assist the policemen inside to check for themselves. He hears a faint heartbeat. When they find nothing wrong with the scene, they all pull up chairs and converse. The longer they sit around the louder the heartbeat gr...
At the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe’s fascination with death is apparent when the narrator ruthlessly killed an old man with a disturbing eye, but felt so guilty that he confessed to the police. The narrator dismembered the old man’s body and hid them in the floor, confident that they were concealed. However, when the police came to investigate, the narrator heard a heart beating and began to crack under the pressure. Overcome with guilt, he confessed that he murdered him and pulled up the floorboards. The narrator exclaimed, “But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” (“Heart” 4). Although the narrator was calm and confident at first, the guilt he experienced drove him mad, causing...
He struggled with depression and loneliness, deaths, and finally his battle with alcoholism. Throughout his life Poe had an ongoing battle of loneliness and depression due to the lost of his loved ones. Since Poe was young his life has revolved around death the first two deaths were his mother and his wife. Both his mother and wife had similar deaths, demise by tuberculosis. Around the illness of Virginia he wrote two short stories indicating his despair “The Raven” and “Eleonora”. “Sprits of the dead” is a perfect example to show how death was expressed in his writings. In “the Black Cat” Edgar’s character has a love for animals and has a fine collection, throughout the story his favorite companion is Pluto the Black Cat that seems to follow him wherever he goes. After months the animals see a drastic change in their owner, he is falling victim to alcohol leading to the hurting and torture of his animals and wife. The black cat in this story can be interrupted in many ways; the cat can be his own shadow and some how he sees himself struggling with alcoholism not knowing how to react to his own faults. For Edgar his only way out of the depression, he faced was to drown himself in alcohol to end the pain he was
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying and grotesque. “The Black Cat is one of the most powerful of Poe’s stories, and the horror stops short of the wavering line of disgust” (Quinn).
In the short story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe the reader is led onto a journey in which they are told the gruesome actions of a disturbed narrator. This subjective narrators' actions are spurred by a heavy alcohol addiction and deteriorating mental state. The narrator tells the reader of his deeds,which ultimately led to his demise, starting with the killing of Pluto. Pluto was the household cat of the narrator and his wife. He was very much cared and adored for but one night after returning home “much intoxicated” the narrator carved one of the poor beasts eyes after he upset him. After that event a disagreeable mood leeches onto the narrator and he decides to hang the pet using a noose and attaches it onto the limb of a tree . A string of evil deeds follows the hanging, including the attempted killing of a new cat who bore a startling resemblance to Pluto and the inevitable murder of the narrators wife by his own hand when she tried to stop the attack on the animal, which follows the act of her being stuffed into the walls of the family cellar. By the end of the story however, the narrator own foolishness and glee at the murder of his own wife are what lead to his ultimate downfall in the form of his capture by the authorities. While at first the motivation of the narrator to kill living beings in cold blood seems to be alcohol, there is also a deeper psychological reason behind his behavior. The narrator does not feel guilt for his deeds and portrays a cold methodical human being, void of conscience or sense of morality.
One of the staples of Poe's writing is the dramatic effect it has on the reader. Poe is known for his masterful use of grotesque, and often morbid, story lines and for his self-destructive characters and their ill-fated intentions. "The Black Cat" is no different from any of his other stories, and thus a Pragmatic/Rhetorial interpretation is obviously very fitting. If Pragmatic/Rhetorical criticism focuses on the effect of a work on its audience, then "The Black Cat" serves as a model for all other horror stories. One of the most intriguing aspects Poe introduces into the story is the black cat itself. The main character initially confesses a partiality toward domestic pets, especially his cat. Most readers can identify with an animal lover, even if they themselves are not. It is not long though before the reader learns of the disease that plagues the main character - alcoholism. Again, the reader can identify with this ailment, but it is hard to imagine that alcoholism could be responsible for the heinous actions made by the main character. In a drunken rage the main character cuts out one of the cat's eyes with a pen knife, and act at which he even shudders. Then, only after the cat's slow recovery from that attack, does the man hang the cat from the limb of a tree. ...