The narrators in “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” want us, as readers, to understand why they behaved immorally. However, because of the circumstances, these narrators prove unreliable and we can’t help but to identify them as psychopaths and sympathize with their victims. Psychopath is defined as a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, and failure to learn from experience. In the short story “The Tell Tale Heart” Poe develops a narrator that is plagued by guilt and wishes to use the story to confess his murder. The narrator tells his story in first person. He fears …show more content…
being misunderstood, and sets out to explain to the reader the circumstances of what happened and essentially prove his sanity to the reader. From the beginning, the narrator describes what he wants to do to the old nervous he is getting, and that he hears things from heaven and hell. He’s trying to make sure that everyone knows that he not insane. He begins by telling the readers how much he loved the “old man”. While the narrator states in the beginning that the old man had never wronged him, he is nonetheless excessively bothered by the man’s eye, which he blames on his own “hypersensitivity.” He writes, “I saw it perfect with distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones” (“TTH”). but he had to kill him because that's what he wanted. He makes plans on how he wants to kill him for eight nights. On the eighth night the man woke from the creaking of the door opening. The man then stabs him and cuts him up, but the only thing that wasn’t dying was the old man's heart. “I thought the heart would burst”. During the time of the murder the man was so happy about what he was doing. He was so proud of finally killing the old man. Because the murder was carefully planned he hid the old man's body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it under the floor. During this time he didn’t care much for any risks because he was so proud of what he just did. He was acting like he just won the lottery, very happy and fulfilled. Toward the end of the story, his hypersensitivity brings him even more anxiety that causes him to reveal himself to the police. “It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (“TTH”). The narrator eventually convinces himself, and attempts to convince the reader, that the sound comes from the heartbeat of the old man that he has hidden underneath the floorboards of the bedroom. The sound grows louder and louder, causing him unbearable agony as he tries to compose himself in front of the police. Eventually, it becomes intolerable. “Villains!’ I shrieked. ‘Dissemble me no more! I admit the deed! – Tear up the planks! Here, here! – It is the beating of his hideous heart!” (“TTH”) The agony of the sound caused the narrator to reveal himself to the police. . His conscience should have interfered and prevented him from behaving this way, which it did not, and a lack of conscience indicates psychopathic behavior. The narrator in “The Black Cat” shows a variety of morbid, senseless, and disturbing acts that land him in a prison cell on death row.
The narrator writes the story the day before he is to be executed, and explains from the beginning how guilty he feels about what he has done. “In their consequences, these events have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me” (“The Black Cat”). The story begins by the man explainng his love for animals and for his wife. He loved his black cat especially “Pluto”. He grew moody when the cat came around, he even got pyshical will his wife.The narrator explains that his moral breakdown began when he started to drink heavily.. One night he came home and the black cat had not come up to him, he go mad at the cat that he took a knife and cut out the cat's eye. He says that he didn’t feel any remorse, once the cat was healed, he took the cat and hanged it on a tree. This already shows psychopathic traits because most serial killers start off by killing animals before anything or anyone else. Torturing animals is an evil and morbid act, even with the presence of alcohol, and is a telltale sign of a psychopath. He didn’t get caught because a fire that he started in his house. He didn’t want anyone to get suspicious of what he did. Serial killers that like or love to kill don’t want to get caught because they will feel the guilt. The reason to kill usually is so that they can get rid of anger. His wife was bothering him so much that he killed his wife with a axe. He couldn’t remove it from the house, so he dragged her body into the basement. He didn’t want anyone to come and find him, so he restructured his walls. “My happiness was supreme” (The Black
Cat). “The Cask of Amontillado” is a psychological horror that explores vengeance as a powerful, driving force behind human beings. Poe wrote this story to satisfy an audience that craved feeling, Poe created a psychological thriller that explores vengeance as a powerful driving force behind his main character. Throughout his story, Poe examines the precise and cunning tactics that Montresor uses to carry out his vengeful plan against Fortunato to ensure he will not get caught. The story starts out by
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
How a man can engage in such evil acts by the sole reaction of the human reflex. The short stories of “The Tale Tell Heart” and “The Black Cat” share many similarities with each other but they are also very different in many ways. One similarity which both accomplish is the themes they represent of murder and the belief in supernatural events caused by their own insanity. In “The Tell Tale Heart” “Poe 's confessional tale features a psychologically ill protagonist who recalls his grisly murder of an old man” (Zimmerman 342) as mentioned is exactly that as it is about a man who felt justified in killing a man because “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so, by degrees very gradually I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” (The Tell Tale Heart 691) as the main character states. According to the main character, the old man’s eye was causing his insanity and it was his justification for killing him. This shares a similarity with the other
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator realizes that he absences a reason for killing the old man he lives with. He even starts to admit having to love the man. He states, “There was no reason for what I did. I did not hate the old man; I even loved him. He had never hurt me. I did not want his money. I think it was his eye” (Poe 64). Psychosis is seen in the difficult rationality the narrator uses to defend his murder. The logic the narrator provides is that he thinks the desire to murder the old man results from the man’s eye, which bothers him. He says, “When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!” (Poe 65). The fact that by this man’s eye is what makes him very angry is such a irrelevant reason for the narrator to kill him. This proves that he is not mentally stable, anyone in their right state of mind would not want to commit such a crime due to an irritation of someone’s eye. This represents the idea that this narrator expresses his complete lack of sanity through the premeditation and planning he put into committing the murder. In the beginning of the story, he says “vulture eye” giving the impression that he is uncertain that the eye is the reason for the murder, he also says how he thinks it’s the eye, he uses past tense as opposed to declaring with certainty that this is why the killing of the man. This shows the contrast to how as a sane person would be sure that this is their reason for killing another person before committing.
The power to change is man’s greatest struggles, since a strong influence that lead them to where they are now. It is also the price and journey that both Montresor in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell Tale Heart” and the narrator of the “The Cask of Amontillado”, another of poe’s story. In both story the narrators, both indicate that they want to get rid of an addiction they had that is driving them to madness, and in order to do so they, must do it at any cost. Both narrator clearly plan on their instincts and carefully plans out methods in which leads them to their satisfaction. These stories contain many similarities and differences in the use of tone, irony and symbolism, of the protagonist. Through these characters and their actions,
Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" is a short story about how a murderer's conscience overtakes him and whether the narrator is insane or if he suffers from over acuteness of the senses. Poe suggests the narrator is insane by the narrator's claims of sanity, the narrator's actions bring out the narrative irony of the story, and the narrator is insane according to the definition of insanity as it applies to "The Tell Tale Heart". First, Poe suggests the narrator is insane by his assertions of sanity. For example, the narrator declares that he planned the murder so expertly he could not be insane. He says, "Now this is the point.
The Tell-Tale Heart: An Analysis In Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the storyteller tries to convince the reader that he is not mad. At the very beginning of the story, he asks, "...why will you say I am mad? " When the storyteller tells his story, it's obvious why. He attempts to tell his story in a calm manner, but occasionally jumps into a frenzied rant.
Tell-Tale Heart, written by Edgar Allan Poe, depicts the inner conflict of a murderer as he retells his story of how he came to kill the old man as a means to prove his sanity. The story is told in the point of view of an unreliable narrator, of whom is greatly disturbed by the eye of a geriatric man. The eye in question is described as evil, irritating the narrator beyond his comprehension, to the point when he has no choice but to get rid of the vexation by destroying the eye. This short story is similar to The Black Cat, of which is also penned by Poe. In The Black Cat, the narrator, albeit unreliable, describes his wrongdoings to the reader. He tells his story of how he murdered his wife, killed one of the two cats, and trapped the other
The two short stories that I have chosen by Edgar Allan Poe are The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat. These two stories in particular have many things in common as far as technique goes, but they do have some significant differences between the two. In this paper I will try to compare and contrast these two short stories and hopefully bring something to the readers attention that wasn't there at first.
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.
Yet, there are two overwhelming explanations behind trusting that Poe 's motivation in "The Tell-Tale Heart" goes past the blend of ghastliness and confusion. Above all else, he has shrewdly muddled his story by making the storyteller 's portrayal of himself and his activities seem inconsistent. Incidentally, the hero endeavors to demonstrate in dialect that is wild and cluttered that he is deliberate, quiet, and
In “The Black Cat”, the main character is consumed so much by his madness, which grows more and more as the story goes on and eventually ends with him being put in jail for murder of his wife. The madness first starts when his love for his black cat, Pluto,turns to utter hatred. He stabs out the
The Black Cat vs. The Tell-Tale Heart The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart are similar in many ways but also very different. Some of the biggest similarities are for one at the beginning of The Black Cat the man does not think that there is anything wrong with him. He states in the text “Yet, mad am I not--and very surely do I not dream.”
At the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe’s fascination with death is apparent when the narrator ruthlessly killed an old man with a disturbing eye, but felt so guilty that he confessed to the police. The narrator dismembered the old man’s body and hid them in the floor, confident that they were concealed. However, when the police came to investigate, the narrator heard a heart beating and began to crack under the pressure. Overcome with guilt, he confessed that he murdered him and pulled up the floorboards. The narrator exclaimed, “But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” (“Heart” 4). Although the narrator was calm and confident at first, the guilt he experienced drove him mad, causing...
Through the first person narrator, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how man's imagination is capable of being so vivid that it profoundly affects people's lives. The manifestation of the narrator's imagination unconsciously plants seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an unmanageable situation for which there is no room for reason and which culminates in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lends itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death would monetarily benefit the narrator. Moreover, the narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator's obsession with the old man's eye culminates in his own undoing as he is engulfed with internal conflict and his own transformation from confidence to guilt.
The Tell Tale Heart is a story, on the most basic level, of conflict. There is a mental conflict within the narrator himself (assuming the narrator is male). Through obvious clues and statements, Poe alerts the reader to the mental state of the narrator, which is insanity. The insanity is described as an obsession (with the old man's eye), which in turn leads to loss of control and eventually results in violence. Ultimately, the narrator tells his story of killing his housemate. Although the narrator seems to be blatantly insane, and thinks he has freedom from guilt, the feeling of guilt over the murder is too overwhelming to bear. The narrator cannot tolerate it and eventually confesses his supposed 'perfect'; crime. People tend to think that insane persons are beyond the normal realm of reason shared by those who are in their right mind. This is not so; guilt is an emotion shared by all humans. The most demented individuals are not above the feeling of guilt and the havoc it causes to the psyche. Poe's use of setting, character, and language reveal that even an insane person feels guilt. Therein lies the theme to The Tell Tale Heart: The emotion of guilt easily, if not eventually, crashes through the seemingly unbreakable walls of insanity.