The cat is killed in a blunt and brutal way but with heartbreak and ‘the bitterness remorse’. Poe purposely uses long sentences and plenty of description to make the reader realise how upset and heartbroken the murderer is about the death of his cat.
The protagonist describes misery and unhappiness in his life due to drinking. After a drunken night he finds the perfect replacement for Pluto. Death is now constantly on the murderers mind, ‘I longed to destroy it with a blow’, Poe shows the murderers fantasy as quiet brutal but and blunt and to the point.
When the narrator murders his wife, Poe uses very little description. ‘Buried the axe in her brain’, this quote is plain and emotionless, the complete opposite of the murder of his cat. This shows that his mental state has completely gone.
Even though Poe tries to make us feel sympathetic towards the murderer, the murderer’s reliability must be questioned due to his drinking and his sheer brutality.
During the Black Cat the murderer kills something he likes; Poe also creates another murderer like this in another of his stories.
The Tell-Tale Heart is a story about the murder of an old man and the only motive being his eye.
The language used in the Tell-Tale Heart is less descriptive than that in The Black Cat. Like the narrator in The Black Cat the murder is described very bluntly, quickly and without any real description. He explains how ‘In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him’. This small quotation is the whole description to a murder that thee writer has built up to from the start of the story. The description shocks the reader because of the bluntness of the language. The short, brief and blunt depiction of death also appears in The Black Cat.
After committing the murder, the narrator doesn’t show any remorse but Edgar Allen Poe uses the heart as a symbol of his guilt. The heart had a ‘low, dull, quick sound’, Poe uses the quickening sound of the heart to symbolise the narrator’s conscience.
Poe never directly makes the narrator show his guilt, instead when the narrators guilt is getting worse he uses the heart as ‘the sound increased’ which implies his guilt without him having to directly say it. This is different to the way remorse is death with in The Black Cat. In The Black Cat the narrator doesn’t seem to show any remorse or regret.
This leads the reader to have more sympathy for the murderer in The Tell-Tale Heart.
The story of call it madness is the most descriptive of the 3 stories. Guy De Maupassant carefully describes ‘the pale blue of water’; Maupassant describes the colour very carefully and offers the reader a glimpse of how beautiful the woman’s eyes are. This contrast to the basic description of ‘a pale blue eye’ in The Tell-Tale Heart.
The detailed description continues when the narrator explains how he wants to murder his wife. He tells of his ‘urge to strangle her, to pin her to the bed’. The narrators fantasy is very detailed and violent giving us an inside into his confused state of mind and his relationship with his wife.
As in The Black Cat the narrator tries to make the reader sympathise with him. At the start of Call It Madness the narrator complains about how he has ‘suffered, suffered unendingly, intensely, agonizingly’. He uses a whining tone which makes the reader feel sorry for him and have pity on him.
The murder in Call It Madness contrasts with the rest of the story. Instead of being very detailed it is blunt and abrupt. Rather than describing the murder in detail he simply ‘let her have my other bullet in the stomach’. This shocking technique is used in all 3 of the stories because it shock the reader after giving such detailed description before hand.
As we have seen all 3 of these stories depict murder in a very blunt way. The authors manipulate the readers into feeling sorry for the murderers before they commit there violent acts.
Once the narrator has murdered the readers begins to feel strong hatred towards them because of how they tricked the readers into believing their innocence.