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The Black Cat,The Black Cat, And The Cask Of Amontillado

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Edgar Allan Poe Essay Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1890. He was an American romanticism author, poet, editor and literary critic. He studied languages at the University of Virginia and married his thirteen year old cousin. Poe having lived a troubled life and losing his parents to tuberculosis at a young age, wrote many sad and morbid stories containing themes such as death, murder, insanity, paranoia, sickness, and tragedy. “The Tell- Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” all contain some or all of these said themes. The Tell-Tale Heart The Tell-Tale Heart takes place in an old house in England, where the narrator and an “old man” live together. The narrator sets the mood for the story immediately with the use of words like “nervous,” “dreadfully,” “mad,” and “haunted.” “TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” The story begins with the narrator trying to convince his audience that he is not mad, but then proceeds to tell us how he killed the old man because he hated his eye. The narrator is telling about how every night he goes into the old man's room to murder him, he tries this for about a week, but every time the narrator creeps into the room the old man's eyes are closed and the narrator cannot see the hideous eye and therefore cannot murder the man. The seventh night however, the old man had trouble sleeping and the narrator heard the heartbeat of the old man and this filled him with rage. He murdered the old man by placing the heavy bed on top of him. After killing the old man, the narrator dismembers his body and places it into the floor boards. The narrator’s neighbors heard the sound and called the police, who come to investigate the narrator's house. Being confident in his work of hiding his sin, the narrator gladly tours the policemen around his house and into the room of which the old man’s body

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