The Tell Tale Heart and the Black Cat Theme Essay Example

The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat Theme Essay
“Can you not see I have full control of my mind? Is it not clear that I am not mad? I could hear sounds I had never heard before. I heard sounds from heaven and I heard sounds from hell!” This quote from the narrator of the short story, ‘The Tell Tale Heart’, shows us how the narrator has completely lost his senses, believing in the supernatural and the narrator even tries to persuade us that he has the powers of a god. One of the main themes in both ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ is unhealthy obsessiveness, the objects of which are also important symbols in the stories. For example, in ‘The Black Cat’, the narrator is unnaturally obsessed with his black cat and its surroundings, believing it to be the cause of his downfall and in ‘The Tell Tale Heart’, the narrator was firstly obsessed with the old man’s vulture-like eye and later his beating heart.
One of the symbols in ‘The Black Cat’ was Pluto, the pet cat. This symbol relates to the theme because the narrator of this story was unnaturally obsessed with the cat, believing that the cat was responsible for all the misfortune and supposedly supernatural things that were happening, such as when his house burned down. The narrator, who was starting to lose his sanity, was convinced that the cat was out to get revenge on him. “The cat was a beautiful animal, of unusually large size, and entirely black. I named the cat Pluto and it was the pet I liked best,” the narrator explains. From this, we can tell the narrator loved his pet cat very much, more than