What Are The Similarities Between The Tell Tale Heart And The Cask Of Amontillado

“The Tell-Tale Heart,” published in 1843, and “The Cask of Amontillado,” published in 1846, are two literary works of Gothic fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. Both of these compelling stories have many prominent similarities and differences. Poe has developed unstable narrators in both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” but the circumstances in each story are distinctively different. While an old man’s hideous eye drives the narrator to madness in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the thirst for revenge influences the narrator in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Although both stories contain a disturbed narrator, the narrator’s personality, the narrator’s motive for murder, and how the narrator displays their guilt is drastically different.

Once the police officers had visited the narrator’s house to investigate a scream heard in the night, the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” became quite nervous and started to fall apart at the seams. After being in agony for long enough, the narrator exclaimed to the officers, “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!--tear up the planks! here, here!--it is the beating of his hideous heart”(110). The narrator suffered painfully as he thought he heard the beating of the old man’s heart, and assumed that the policemen heard the loud noise as well. As it turns out, it was the narrator’s heart that was beating uncontrollably due to his feeling of guiltiness after committing the murder of a man he once cared about. It was so difficult for the narrator to handle his emotions after his heinous actions that he ultimately gave into the nagging guilt and pressure in the authority's presence. The narrator’s intense guilt about killing the old man eventually lead to him confessing to the murder and directing the police officers to the dead body. On the other hand, the narrator in “The Cask of Amontillado” displays little guilt about killing Fortunato rather than a full-fledged confession. The only instance when Montresor expresses his guilt in the story is after he sets fire to Fortunato, ending his foe once and for all. When Fortunato doesn’t reply to Montresor in the final moments of his life, Montresor finally acts, “I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so”(83). Although Montresor clearly denied his internal feelings by blaming them on the damp catacombs, the reader can infer that his “heart grew sick” because of his guilt.