The Narrators In The Tell Tale Heart And The Black Cat

The narrator butchered the man. That is an indisputable fact. The question is, is he sane? The narrator stalked an innocent man for 8 nights, then brutally murdered and grotesquely dismembered him. He then proceeds to put the body parts under the floor boards. The narrator talks about his surprisingly logical thought process, the careful and perfect execution of his plan, and his terrible guilt as he could hear the dead man’s heart beat. The defense will tell you that this man is an innocent, sedentary man, and that everything he did was the fault of his mental illness, but do not listen to them. This man is deleterious, and it is imperative that he is locked away. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” was sane because he could distinguish fantasy from reality, he could feel guilt, and he was thinking logically. This evidence will prove that the narrator is sane.

An unreliable narrator is a narrator that necessarily cannot be trusted by the way they talk, and or the way they describe the way certain events occurred. You cannot believe everything an unreliable narrator says. Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are unreliable because they are both mentally ill or have a serious problem with drinking. When reading a story you want to know all the details correctly and an unreliable narrator can change your understanding of the story, which both of the narrators do in the two short stories. The narrator's show a lot of evidence that they are both unreliable because of their sicknesses.

1. He is not a reliable narrator because he is insane. Though he repeatedly states that he is sane, the reader suspects otherwise from his bizarre reasoning, behavior, and speech. ‘‘True—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?'' The reader realizes through Poe’s description of the narrator’s extreme nervousness that the protagonist has in fact descended into madness, as anxiety is a common symptom of insanity. He apparently suffers from some form of paranoia. Besides, the narrator claims that he loves the old man and has no motive for the murder other than his growing dislike of a cloudy film over one of the old man’s eyes. His madness becomes

Edgar Allen Poe's narrators are unreliable such as in the stories, ¨A Tell-Tale Heart¨ and ¨The Black Cat¨ because the narrators are alcoholics and have mental disabilities. A unreliable narrator is someone who can not be trusted to tell a story in the correct way because there is something wrong with them that makes them incapable of telling a story. For example, in the stories listed above the narrators are either always intoxicated or they have mental disabilities which make them illegible to explain a story. They can alter or change the story to fit their perspective and they could forget a part or even be making it up. Since they are unreliable you can not trust what they say. In all of Poe's work the narrators are unreliable and there are many ways to prove it.

What happens when an individual descends into madness? This process is the focus of both Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain.” Both texts use many structural techniques and literary devices to draw attention to the central idea of insanity. This insanity takes the form of a deviation from what the reader would consider normal. In spite of the two authors’ drastically different writing styles, one element remains constant, the masterful use of punctuation.

“The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are both written by a famous American writer named Edgar Allan Poe. In these stories, he writes as a nameless narrator that at first seems calm, but really, has an issue with something to the point where he has to kill it. In both of these stories, he does ending up killing someone or something, which would make it seem like it's the same story, but they have some similarities but a lot of differences which I will explain in the following paragraphs.

One’s mind holds the truth that the rest of the world does not know. People have the choice to tell the world the truth, and even if they do not speak the truth, it is just hidden in their mind. Although people sometimes hide the truth, their actions can help you determine if they are speaking truthfully. For example, in the short story “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe the narrator does not tell the reader what exactly happens, and he alters the truth. The narrator is unreliable because he exaggerates the truth, is insane, and acts as an omniscient narrator at times.

Insanity, the true definition is doing something over and over again expecting the same result. It is a thing, that can affect a person and make them slightly off their rocker. The landlady seems like a sweet old lady until we find out that she takes her victims and stuffs them in her free time. While the narrator from the “Tell-Tale Heart” does nothing like this. He only kills his victim, and they may both kill someone, but the landlady kills multiple people. They may both be insane but the landlady is more so, because she poisons as well as stuffs her victims, kills more people than the narrator, and she keeps trophies of the people she kills and leaves them out in the rooms that they stayed in.

Horror is fiction that scares the audience or gives an eerie mood. Each short story develops horror is its own way. “The Tell Tale Heart” is about how an old man is murdered because of his evil vulture eye. “A Rose for Emily” is about how an old woman poisoned her lover to keep him from leaving. “The Lottery” is about how this town has a drawing to see who will be the sacrifice to the crops. Horror is developed in “The Tell Tale Heart,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “The Lottery” with many elements of horror.

Edgar Allen Poe is known to many as a very talented and interesting writer in his time. However, unlike many other authors, Poe was not successful during his lifetime at all. He was very poor and depressed from the loss of his loved ones, and also was a heavy drinker. In his poems and short stories, he uses the experiences of losing his loved ones and manifests them differently in his works. In some of his stories, he incorporates these losses similarly, and yet he does have some differences in his works. In two of his works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, he uses the fatalities of his mother and wife to write two great stories. Although “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe seem similar on the surface

In “The Black Cat,” the man was married to a patient and caring woman. They acquired another cat that, according to the man, looked remarkably like Pluto (709). One day, the cat almost tripped the man while they were walking down a flight of stairs. This “exasperated” the man “to madness” (Poe 709). He lifted an axe and “aimed a blow at the animal,” (Poe 709).

For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him”. He abused all the other animals and even his wife but he never hurt Pluto. The first black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s evil heart. It shows favouritism and obsession with black cats from the start this story, later after he had murdered Pluto, he still went out and realised when he saw the second cat that it is what he was looking for. “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.”. The second black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s guilt. This fact about the cat made him hate more simply because he felt guilty of what he had done to Pluto. His guilt and religious torment gives us an insight to his insanity.

Edgar Allen Poe was known for his dark-romanticism writings which evoked horror in readers. Seen specifically in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, readers are able to get into the mind of the mentally ill narrator who murders an elderly man, one whom he claimed to love. Poe created conflict in this story by having the narrator admit to loving the man and having him be his caretaker. Conflict, and the story line, is created because it makes readers question why he would commit such a heinous crime as killing and dismembering the man. Readers eventually find out that it is the elderly man’s eye that pushes the narrator to do what he does. The narrator is trying to justify his actions and prove his sanity by explaining how he observes

John Green once said, “It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see,” a fitting quote to define the works of American author, Edgar Allen Poe, known for his short stories written in the 1800’s. Famous works include “The Black Cat”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “Berenice" before his untimely death in 1849. Often ridiculed for his absurd stories, Poe was fueled by his many losses in his childhood, including his mother and wife, and alcoholism. Many of his stories are that of the horror genre and often uses an unreliable character. Just as some of his most famous characters, Poe was seen as a mentally unstable man who was burdened by the hardships of his life. Through unreliable narratives, Poe emphasizes fear in the thin line

Like many of Edgar Allen Poe's works, The Tell-Tale Heart is a dark story. This story focuses on the events leading to the death of an old man, as the sanity of his killer crumbles. Poe uses irony and first-person perspective to show a sense of paranoia within the story.