Madness Overload

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“Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, with an obsession you keep coming back to the same question and never receive an answer.” Ones guilt and obsessions can turn a normal human into an abnormal madman. The two short stories “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” by Ray Bradbury, and “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe are two different pieces of text that share the same content such as theme, characters, and setting. “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” is a story that describes how possibly a man can turn obsessed by killing another man in revenge and freak out about where he has left his last finger prints. Where “The Tell Tale Heart” is a short story that explains to the readers how much guilt can eat ones mind alive and make them confess the truth. Both these stories relate when it comes to murder and madness and also similar in content. The next few paragraphs will explain how obsessions and guilt are the two main reasons that drive normal humans into crazy psychopaths, which also leads to the theme “Madness”. Also analyzing the text to find similar content between both stories such as setting, theme and characters. An average criminal always plans out carefully on each and every step he or she decides to take. In both these short stories the author decides to chose on a very private and secure setting to get their conquer task done. Pulling two quotes from the story “Tell Tale Heart” states “And every night about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it oh so gently” (Edgar 2) and “It took me an hour to place my whole within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed” (Edgar 2). In comparison to the “The Fruit at the bottom of the Bowl” it states in the t...

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...s and murder through the thoughts and help of guilt and obsession. In conclusions it is proven that obsessions and guilt are the two main reasons that drive a normal human into a crazy psychopath which leads to the cause of they key theme, “Madness” Madness and murder are the key themes to both these stories in a general state. Both authors show the murders descent into madness very effectively. The narrator in “The Tale Tell Heart” became obsessed caused by his hallucination due to the sounds of the old mans heart still beating in his head. Likewise how Acton William kills Huxley and after all turns obsessed and mad with cleaning off his finger prints that didn’t even exist. Therefore both these stories really have emphasized to the readers how people who seem to be so confident and show so much ambition can only do such dark things due to their imaginations.

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