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Theme Of The Black Cat And The Tell Tale Heart

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Edgar Allan Poe is famous for the feature of sinister elements, violent behavior, and psychologically unstable characters in his literal works. Two of Poe’s well-known literary works, “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” both engage with narrators who are in an unhealthy state of mind. Both narrators successfully commit and conceal atrocious murders, but eventually, are exposed for their heinous crimes due to their own insanity. With “The Black cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe gives us two great examples of the human mind’s capacity to deceive itself, and its ability to speculate on the nature of its own destruction. Thus, this essay will present the ways in which Poe employs madness as a theme in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Poe’s “The Black Cat” …show more content…

As a product of his imagination – the imagination that the cat avoids him – the narrator violently grabs the cat by its throat and atrociously gashes out one of its eyes. This perverse act of violence subsequently turns out to be the commencement of several such acts of perversity. For instance, we come across an additional element of perversity that gives evidence for a theme of madness in “The Black Cat.” The “spirit of perverseness” (Poe 696) that triumphs over the narrator once again is explained as an “unfathomable longing of the soul […] to offer violence to its own nature–to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only” (Poe 697). Here, the narrator attempts to rationalize this by saying that perverseness resides in the human heart and is an indivisible primal reaction that cannot be separated from the nature of Man (Poe 697). He continues by writing, “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?” (Poe 697). Once more, the narrator makes an effort to appeal to the reader by attempting

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