Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, both authors who are

eminent for the content of their stories, wrote about crime. Though

they invented stories concerning crime, they both wrote through

different perspectives. This essay is going to compare how the

characters of both stories, 'Tell Tale Heart' written by Poe, and 'The

Adventure of the Speckled Band' written by Doyle, have been portrayed

differently by their authors as well as exploring into the language

style of the two stories.

The historical backgrounds of both authors have influenced the way

their stories are written.

Poe was seen to have an unstable life as his mother died at and early

age of three, and after that he was taken into a foster home of John

Allan. He was educated at the University of Virginia. Later he went

through a quarrel with his foster father and left home. He served in

the U.S. Army under a false name, Edgar A. Perry, and incorrect age

and then attended West Point from 1830 to 1831 but got himself

dismissed when he realized he would never be reconciled with his

foster father. He wrote Gothic novels, which is a type of fiction,

written in reaction to 18th-c rationalism, that reclaims mystery and

licenses extreme emotions. His third volume of poetry brought him

neither fame nor profit but in 1833 he won a prize for best short

story. From 1844, he settled down in New York as an editor and all

this while he was gaining some reputation for his short stories,

poems, reviews, and essays, such stories as "The Fall of the House of

Usher" (1839), "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), and "The Gold bug"

(1843), would later be regard...

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...e of the Speckled Band,' it could be seen that they

both follow a formulaic plot, but the authors accentuate on different

parts of the plot, such as the problem or development, in different

proportions, either emphasizing more or less on it. For example, Poe

emphasizes the self-obsessive actions and feelings of the protagonist

in the development more than the others, whereas Doyle emphasizes more

on the problem, which is discussed between the client and Holmes. In

Doyle's stories there are many characters, which are significant in

the plot in their own way, such as Holmes, Watson, the convict and the

victim, whereas in Poe's stories the protagonist is the victim

himself. The language is intricate, in both stories, from their own

point of views, but because of Holmes' logical reasoning behind

everything and Poe's self-obsessive actions, it does not seem so.