The Tell-Tale Heart Compare Contrast Essay

The narrator liked the old man, and didn’t want to harm him at all, but he couldn’t stand his eye, and thought the only way to get rid of it would be to kill him. The narrator didn’t for a second think things through or consider the consequences of his actions, and killed the old man. Then the beating of the heart began and drove him to insanity.

Having moved into a new house, the narrator happens across a black cat, which then follows him home. Nerves rattled, the narrator does his best to avoid the cat. When that fails he tries to kill it, accidentally killing his wife in the process. After sealing his wife's body into the basement wall, he is interviewed by the police. Not unlike in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator of “The Black Cat” cracks under the pressure of his guilt and gives himself up. Symbolism and suspense make “The Black Cat” worth reading.

Both stories start off by briefing the listener on the elaborate scheme of events to come while introducing important character flaws. The narrator of The Black Cat shows evident signs of being mad through his actions and alcoholism. Essentially, the narrator cuts out his cat's eye, hangs the cat, possibly burns down his house, and kills his wife. Throughout these events alcohol complicates the plot line and hinders the narrator's ability to accurately tell the story. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart also uses his actions and personal flaws to convey his unreliability as a storyteller. The story begins with the narrator posing the question of his sanity and disproving the accusation with his evidence being his calm and meticulous demeanor. He continues on to explain that he would sneak into his landlord's apartment at

Furthermore, he yelled and tried to take out the parts of the corpse from underneath the ground. Due to his actions, the policemen acknowledged that the servant was the criminal, and so they arrested him. The narrator of the Black Cat story starts with a man that had been arrested for killing his wife with an ax instead of killing his cat, “I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife”(“The Black Cat” 4). Also, the man kept announcing that he is sane.

For an hour he stood at the old man's chamber door quietly. In his madness, which he insists it's just an "over-acuteness" of his senses, he believes he hears the beating of the old man's heart. At first, he reveled in the old man's terror but with every moment that he heard that beating sound his fury grew more and more. The more nervous he became, the faster and louder the beating sound became. When he could take it no more, the storyteller goes into a paranoid frenzy. During this frenzy, the storyteller is afraid that neighbors will hear the beating of the old man's heart. This causes him to take action. He quickly subdues the old man and kills him. But is it really the old man's heart the storyteller hears? Even after the storyteller kills the old man, he still hears the heart slowly pounding and then finally stopping. Was it the old man’s heart, or rather was the storyteller hearing his own heart beat in his ears? As the storytellers rage and excitement grew, so did the sound. It did not go away until after the storyteller slowly calmed down, until after his deed was finished.

The opening of ‘The black cat’ gives the reader the knowledge of the narrators past ‘from my infancy I was especially fond of animals’. A lonely image of the narrator is portrayed in the readers mind as he explains he was closer to

While doing it, tears streamed down his face. He is ashamed of what he has become. He knows that the cat had loved him and had given him no reason to hang it. What he did was an act of pure perversity- doing wrong for the sake of wrong. In The Black Cat, there are many themes such as transformation, irony, and loyalty.

Previously untouched by the horrors of slavery, the woman owns the “pets”, or slaves, alongside her husband. As he mistreats the animals, he also begins to mistreat her. As Poe writes, “The moodiness of [the narrator’s] usual temper increased to hatred of all things and all of mankind… and ungovernable outbursts of a fury… [his] uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and most patient of sufferers” (699). Touched by the repercussions of the corruption of slavery, the previously “uncomplaining” and docile wife immediately recognizes the evil in her husband’s attempted murder of another black cat, another slave.

The Narrator in “The Black Cat” is explained as a man who fell into alcoholism and let deception take control over his mindset (Poe 79). His change of perspective over things causes him to believe his beloved first black cat (Pluto) is evil and demonic when the cat bites him one day (Poe 80). During the illusion from the excessive alcohol, he hangs Pluto (Poe 80). From guilt further on from killing his first cat, the narrator adopts another black cat. A while later, he comes to believe that the new cat has the same characteristics that Pluto had (Poe 82). In an act of fit from the new Black cat almost tripping him on the cellar stairs, the narrator starts to try to kill him with an axe (Poe 84). His wife comes in and tries to stop him, but instead that causes him to kill her. The narrator hides his wife’s body in a cellar wall, meanwhile the cat vanished (Poe 84). Four days later, the police came to do a thorough search. The narrator acted strangely calm and innocent, as if he had done nothing. They discovered her corpse with the cat standing on her head howling in the cellar wall though, and took the narrator into custody. (Poe 85-86).

Do you think it’s possible to act “insane” to get out of murder charges? It shouldn’t be. In the story ”The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator confesses to murdering the old man who was his living acquaintance. He took wise precautions like preparing for days and hiding the body. He is guilty because he knew exactly what he was doing when committing the crime. He could have stopped at anytime but he didn’t. This was a premeditated murder.

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe is a strange story about a mentally “crazy” murderer who insists he is sane, in spite of his insane act of murdering his “vulture eyed” housemate and his delusions that include hearing his housemate’s heart beat after his death. In the end, the “crazy” murderer’s heart is full of guilt, and he decides to confess his crime. To further understand the story to a certain point, three of the literary elements are explored: point of view, settings, and theme. The Tell-Tale Heart focuses on the storyteller’s own point of view; his compulsive, absurd obsessions.

Moreover, it has been argued that the cat is a metaphor for the narrator’s wife. Critics claim that the following passage raises suspicion that the killing of the first cat was actually the murder of his own wife. Poe writes: Norton Anthology American Literature. 7th. 1. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. 705-711. Print.

Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.

The next trick used in this story to make it scary was the beating of the mans heart once he woke up and came to be suspicious that someone was in the room with him. The speaker describes the beating of the heart as "so strange a noise as [it] excited me to uncontrollable terror" (Poe, 3). At this point the reader may think that it is the conscious of the speaker that is really bothering him rather than the mans heartbeat. Every time the speaker refers to the heartbeat he says that it keeps getting louder and louder. One can come to the assumption that at this point the speaker is only looking for reasons to support his killing a man. And in fact it is the beating of the mans heart that drove the speaker/killer to confessing about what he has done and showing the police where the body was.

Throughout “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Edgar Allan Poe, tries to convey the central themes of guilt and insanity to the audience. How the narrator tells the story proves the theory completely. He tells his audience how he plans to kill the old man, and he takes them with him every step of the way. While telling the readers how he murders the man, he also assures them that he is not mad or insane. However, the readers know that he is crazy because he kills a harmless old man, that he claims to love, solely because he fears his eyeball. He is trying to convince himself of this, as well as, trying to convince his audience. Though he proves to have a mental incapability, he still shows signs of morality and guilt. The beating heart demonstrates this human quality that he obtains. When the narrator uses the lantern in his plan, he shows signs of