Comparing Poe's The Black Cat, And The Tell-Tale Heart

Everyone is familiar with the adrenaline rush of terror, the terribly wonderful allure of thrillers, and the bone-chilling feeling of something crawling ever-so-slowly down their spine. Humans tend to seek out things that give them a friendly jolt of horror. That, in itself, could be why Poe’s works are so timeless. All that he did would contribute to his signature effect: macabre. Poe used dark subject matter, words with disturbing connotations, and insinuations of daftness in his characters to construct a deeply perturbing mood in his works, namely “The Raven,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
It could be said that Poe used his own melancholy life experiences to fuel his somber subject material. Wherever Poe may have went, he could not outrun death, for those he held close all fell to their graves until he was almost completely abandoned. In similar fashion, the main characters of

most of his pieces have loved ones that were stolen from them by death itself. In “The Raven,” the death of the speaker’s lover drives him into a manic depression where he has an extensive, emotional conversation with a raven. Interestingly enough, his wife was suffering from tuberculosis during the writing of this piece, making the utter desperation and sorrow expressed in the narrative all the more heartbreaking. In contrast with “The Raven,” “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” tell of murders committed by the narrators, coupled with the unsettling addition of a mental disorder causing the narrators to end the lives of those closest to them. His exploration of the human psyche together with the talk of death and darkness created a mood that’s so horribly unforgettable.
Poe’s word use itself adds to the woeful tone that his readers have so come to love.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” constantly uses words such as “dreadful,” “haunting,” and “madness” to describe the terrible actions and mindset of the protagonist. He writes: “Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now --again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! Louder!” (Poe 4). He skillfully crafts panic and madness by using vocabulary and overall thoughts that reflect that state of mind. In “The Black Cat,” as well, he uses diction to disturb his audience. “The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!” (Poe 5). Constructing a picture that stains the minds of readers with fear, he wrote of terror and death and

madness.
The most constant element of Poe’s writing is arguably madness. The insinuation of said madness is perpetuated by the narrators’ denial of it. The protagonist of “The Black Cat” claims, “Yet I am not mad… [My friendship with Pluto] lasted in this manner for several years, during which my general temperament and character—through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.” (Poe 1), in which he claims that a spirit, a demon, a fiend caused his transition from kindheartedness to ferocity. Likewise, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” goes on to say, “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. 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.” (Poe 1). Both pieces contain unreliable narrators that prove their own daftness by denying it, and then subsequently disprove their previous statement by recounting the events that got them arrested. The mind is a very powerful instrument, as Poe knew, and he proved his love for the dark workings of it by giving his characters a decreased mental state.
The narratives, short stories, and poems of Edgar Allan Poe shaped the following era romantic storytelling. Darkness weighs down almost all of Poe’s pieces, and his crafting of unsettling moods is masterful, for his usage of somber subjects, words, and characters is nearly unmatched. Consequently, one could say that Poe’s mental disturbance manifested in his writings, and the sane and neurotypical stay away from such nightmarish topics. Though, if that is true, then why have Poe’s writings forevermore plagued American bookshelves?