The Tell Tale Heart And The Tell Tale Heart

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Edgar Allan Poe is a famous American writer who immensely contributed to the American literature. Poe is famous for his great command of poetic figures of speech reflected in his poems. What is even more commonly attributed to him is the use of gothic devices, which made him distinguishable among other authors. His skillful writing results in stories so vivid that readers can imagine exactly what he had in mind. Poe wrote numerous short stories and they are also part of his valuable legacy. His stories are characterized by unusual topics, surprising endings, and often dark atmosphere. This paper focuses on comparison of two of Poe’s works, the one is Tell Tale Heart and the other is The Black Cat. In the Black Cat the storyteller is controlled by the devil rum which thus makes him present horrible monstrosities upon his cat and his darling wife. The missing eye of the cat that frequently haunts the storyteller after he killed his cat is typical of the first rival to the storyteller. The more the storyteller is laid open to the apparition, the more he permits himself to be overwhelmed by franticness. In
The Tell Tale Heart the old man's eye is the point of convergence of the story, which drives the storyteller to madness making him to murder the old man. The storyteller tries to demonstrate to the audience his rational soundness, yet the story that he tells surely uncovers that he is in fact insane. The similarity in the settings can be found; The setting for the Black Cat is based in a house while the setting for the Tell Tale Heart is in the house of the old man featured in the story. The settings are used to give explanation of where exactly do the gothic things happen coupled with violence and anguish. The story was written in ... ... middle of paper ... ...stories. Poe composed from the point of view of one who accepted that anybody could confer such a crazy and insane act at any given minute. As the analysis has shown, there are more similarities than differences between the stories. Apart from specific details, these two stories share some characteristics with majority of Poe’s stories. Poe manages to make readers feeling confused, a bit scared and definitely under the impression. The surreal elements of his stories make them seem to be somewhere on the boundaries of this world. This constant balance between the two worlds – the one that is real, and the imaginary one which exists inside the heads of the characters, is what makes his stories so unpredictable. And no matter how many of Poe’s stories we read, we always end up startled because the world which we do not understand and we fear of always wins in the end.

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