Essay Comparing The Yellow Wallpaper And The Tell-Tale Heart

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Only the insane would believe a woman lived within the wallpaper and an eye was a motive to kill. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe are both stories told in the first person with a narrator who becomes obsessed with the antagonist. The narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart proves to be the most unreliable because he has unclear motives of murdering an innocent man and he claims that he has acute senses.
The narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart is driven insane by the eye of an Old Man he is taking care of. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper begins to get obsessed with yellow wallpaper in an old nursery that she is kept in all day. The narrator in a Tell-Tale Heart takes his fixation with the Old Man’s eye to an extreme and murders him because of it, without a clear explanation of why. “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.” (Poe 1) Here, the narrator exaggerates the fear the eye brings out in him because of the appearance of his eye. The narrator shows the way he is not credible due to his mental state. The narrator then says gradually, he had …show more content…

The narrator of the Yellow Wallpaper claims to have seen a woman in the wallpaper of her room. The narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart senses get the best of him, much like his anger. “I heard all things and heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” (Poe 1) The narrator has a false sense of reality, convinced he can truly hear things that are not there. This point becomes relevant when the narrator says “I found the noise was not within my ears.” (Poe 6) The narrator is talking about how he hears the heartbeat of the old man he killed, the reader is given a clear image this is not a possibility when the narrator explains how he dismembered the body. The narrator’s heightened hearing is the cause for his

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