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Comparing 'The Tell-Tale Heart And The Landlady'

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A Tell-Tale heart by Edgar Allen Poe and The Landlady by Roald Dhal are two short horror stories about murders committing self-serenity. The Tell-Tale Heart regards an unknown man with a deranged mind. He murdered an innocent man spite of his eye. However, he is overwhelmed by guilt and confesses his crimes. “The Landlady” recounts a story of a traveller, Billy Weaver, stumbling upon a bed and breakfast. The landlady, seemingly is cheerful and pleasant is also demented. She lures her customers to her bed and breakfast offers tea. Tea has a “pickled walnut” taste, which implies is cyanide. Due to cyanide poisoning, she murders her customers to be stuffed into human dolls. Within the short stories, both protagonists portray delusional thoughts, …show more content…

In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the protagonist views things in his own perspective. He does not seem to see things as they really are. He believes that he has the ability to sense and hear things in Heaven and Hell and has an absurd conviction of his beliefs. His conscience alters his perspective to lead him to believe that after he killed the old man, he was still able to hear “the beating of his hideous heart” (Poe 6). In “The Landlady”, the landlady, at first seems to be very pleasant and angelic, but the narrator came to find out how twisted and lonely she really was. She eyes him hungrily and says, “it [is not] very often [one] has the pleasure to taking a visitor into my own nest.” (Dahl 5) Due to lack of interaction, the landlady begins to preserve the relationship she had with her previous customers. She begins to turn her lost ones and customers she is fond of into stuffed human dolls. The protagonist from The Tell-Tale Heart and the Landlady are both very deranged characters. They have both succumbed to ludicrous beliefs due to own inner conflicts. The protagonist from The Tell-Tale Heart cannot tell the difference between his perceptions and reality. His utter confusions blur his morality and cause him to commit crazy actions. He even continues to convince the readers of his sanity as narrates his story. While the Landlady has fallen to desperate loneliness. She clings on to her temporary customers to the extent where she kills them so they can keep her

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