The Tell Tale Heart and A Confession Found In A Prison In The Time Of Charles II

Compare and Contrast The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe and A

Confession Found In A Prison In The Time Of Charles II by Charles

Dickens

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We have looked at two different short stories by two different

authors. The first story is called ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar

Allan Poe and the second is called ‘A Confession found in a prison in

the time of Charles II’ by Charles Dickens. I have found out that that

they both have a murder theme in common. There are also other similar

themes between the two poems such as early confessions.

The plot in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is about a mad man that has the

motive to kill an old man because of the look of his eye. We know that

the mad is mad because he says on a number of occasions that he is not

‘mad’. This repetitiveness shows some evidence of a degree of madness.

He also claims to ‘love the old man’ and says that ‘he has never

wronged me’ but still has every intension on killing him because his

eye ‘resembled that of a vulture’. The idea of wanting to kill, a man

because his eye is like that of a vulture’s eye, is not a plausible

reason. This backs-up the idea that the author is mad. The man himself

does not know where this idea came from, and I know this because he

says ‘It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain. He

also confesses early to what his intensions are for the murder which

is an important point to consider when comparing the two stories.

In ‘A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles II’ there is

also a motive to kill but it’s not an old man. The victim in this

story is a young boy. The motive to kill is that he sees the boy’s

mother in the eyes of th...

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...with nothing distinctively exiting about him. I also enjoyed the

build up to murder more because there was a lot more tension and it

was very exiting. The idea of an eye looking like a vulture’s eye as a

motive for murder was interesting and quite amusing. Also in the story

there were a lot of unexpected things that happened such as the

lantern making a noise and waking the old man. These sorts of things

along with a combination of other things made me want to read on.

However, ‘A confession found in a prison in the time of Charles II’

did have good parts about it such as when the boy was followed down to

the stream just before the murder and also the pregnancy at the

beginning. The narrator was a bit boring so therefore not as good as

the narrator in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ On the whole I found it too

long and difficult to read, understand and interpret.