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

In literature, Edgar Allen Poe is widely known for his short stories that all have common dark, non-moralistic theme. Considering, Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” have no exceptions. Theses works show exemplementry stories of narrators who have gone mad, murdered out of wickedness, and seek redemption from those who’ll listen. Poe’s unique writing styles and plot grabs hold of the reader’s attention and takes them down a dark, spiraling path of the narrators’ minds. From different theories from many acquiring minds, to the simple impressions given form the characters themselves, one can see the war between characterizing them as mad or thriving for deep redemption. However, in both these short stories, Poe’s narrators represent
On this point alone, Badenhausen seems to be on the right track. Pos’s “The Black Cat,” does present to have an eerie black, fluffy, and “sagacious to an astonishing degree” (“The Black Cat,” 64) feline. There are many motives Badenhausen conjectured from Poe’s narrator; his main belief is his emphasis on the latter’s audience. The narrator, according to Badenhausen’s words, “is constantly quailing, correcting, and explaining himself, in the hope that the audience will see events from his perspective” (Badenhausen, 488). This, the character actions revealed to the audience itself, clearly depicts the insanity of the narrator’s. In both, “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe allows his main characters to “speak” to the audience to allow them a chance to explain their actions. Although the narrator believes their stories they are telling the readers are fair and believes they do not need saving, many theorists believe deep down they thrive to be redeemed. Another theorist has brought up one term: Ego-Evil, which “refers to behavior motivated by selfish calculation and greed” (Wing-Chi, 25-26). Ego- Evil is shown in “The Black Cat,” by the way
Poe writes his story, allowing the narrator to present his story to an audience who has a choice to listen, almost like a jury, so the narrator had the “opportunity and capability to receive penance for his deed” (Badenhausen 493). However, in “The Black Cat” he falls on verbal tricks, for example, when he labels his story as plain or declaring he is not mad before relaying his story (“The Black Cat,” 64). Poe’s characters are also known for manipulating the reader “with multiple evasions and explanations” (Bandenhausen, 493). Throughout both “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrators, both try to relate their story in a way not to make them look like monsters. They try to make the audience understand that their actions are just and it was because “the fury of a demon” (“The Black Cat,” 64) or a man’s “dull blue [eye], with a hideous veil over it” (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” 38). To reinstate, not only do Poe and Dickens’s ideas, wording, and symbolism match, but the overall appearances of the homicides as well. Poe’s victims are confronted with a friend like manner, like the old man from a “The Tell-Tale Heart” when the narrator greets him (Krappe, 86; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 37), Dickens’s presented a toy boat to the child (Krappe, 86). In each of the three stories the victims are hidden in cleverly thought out places, like the garden (Krappe,