Thursday, October 24, 2013

What are the differences and similarities between "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe?

Both of
these stories have narrators that murder someone and bury them in a part of their house.  Both
of the narrators are caught by the police.  Both have supernatural events occur to them (or, at
least, a hallucination of their senses)--in "" the man thinks he sees the cat
everywhere, and in "" he thinks he hears the dead man's heartbeat.  Both narrators
have been put into confinement--one in jail, about to be executed ("The Black Cat"),
and the other one is some other indeterminate form of confinement, from which he is eager to
prove he is not insane.  Both are written in the first-person point of view.


Differences between the two are in the narrator's intent in the murders--in "The
Tell-Tale Heart" he planned his murder for a long time, stealthily waiting for the right
moment, whereas the narrator in "The Black Cat" killed his moment with no forethought,
but in a moment of blind rage.  The narrators were found out in different ways too; in "The
Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator confessed openly, when he was afraid of being found out, but
in "The Black Cat," the police found out not through a confession, but through
discovering the body themselves.  The narrator in "The Black Cat" was an alcoholic,
which led to his temper and problems, but the narrator in the other was not--he just claimed to
have a "heightened sense of hearing" from a "disease."  Granted, that
disease could have been alcoholism, but it isn't specified.  The supernatural thing that drives
these men crazy in the stories is different--in one it's a cat, in the other it's a heartbeat. 
And, the purpose in telling their tales also differs.  In "The Black Cat" the narrator
says it is just his way of unburdening his soul before he dies; for "The Tell-Tale
Heart" the narrator tells his story in a desperate attempt to prove that he isn't
insane.

I hope that those thoughts helped a bit; good
luck!

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