A Comparison between Two Pre-Twentieth Century Stories : "Tell Tale" and "The Black Cat"

There is no evidence of the 'Tell Tale' being written in a certain place, but 'The Black Cat' was written in jail, before the man's death. So it is like he is confessing to you about the deeds he had committed.

Poe somehow makes it as thought the protagonist in both 'The Black Cat' and 'Tell Tale' is actually talking to you while you are reading the story. I think that is an extremely good way to keep people into the stories and on the edge of their seats. This is because you feel like you a really there in the same room as the killer. The protagonist starts off to seem as though he is a sane man in 'The Black Cat' but as you read on you begin to think that he has lost his sanity and is now a little mentally disturbed.

Why the protagonist in 'The Black Cat' kills the cat is not known, but there is the evidence to show that he kills the cat and harms it because it loved him. This also something featured in 'The Imp of the Perverse'. The impression of things happening due to the fact that if it is wrong to do something, you do it to get a "buzz". There is a mischievous feel to that idea, and you could say that we have all done a bad thing just because it was bad to do it.

There is the feeling that the protagonist is trying to make out to the reader that he is sane and in the 'Tell Tale' he actually thinks to himself that he superior to average human being. He has this impression that he has a disease that has opened his senses instead of destroying them, they gave him acute hearing and thought.

The protagonist then tells you about the strong relationship that he has between his victim, whether it was a cat, a wife or an old man. Somehow he loses this love and ends up killing his companion. There is a conclusion to the killings though, you could say he killed them because they loved him and cared for him, back to 'The Imp of the Preverse'. There was comfort and love and for this reason he just killed them. Both of the murders were carried out in a brutal way due to the fact that they were killed in a horrible way and the bodies were hidden in and under parts of a house.

The body in the 'Tell Tale' was cut up and kept in the house like a treasure, but the body in 'The Black Cat' was not mutilated anymore and was not regarded as a treasure.

Poe uses dashes in-between certain words, I think he has done this to try and give the impression that the protagonist is having a conversation with the reader and that he is spilling his thoughts to you.

In the 'Tell Tale' the guilt of the murder drives the protagonist to reveal the bodies. He feels that he has done something extremely bad and in the end he is driven mad by the guilt and is eventually found out by the police while they are on a visit to the house. In 'The Black Cat' he was found out by his excitement of being caught, he tapped on the walls in the cellar commenting on how well the walls were built. This then had him found out by the police and he was taken to jail.

However there are differences, in the 'Tell Tale' the murder is not spontaneous, rather it is carefully planned by the killer. Whereas in 'The Black Cat' the murder was not planned at all, it happen at the spur of the moment without much thought at all.

Also in the 'Tell Tale' you automatically have evidence of there being a murder right at the start, so the tension is built up in different ways. In 'The Black Cat' you have no evidence at all in the beginning that there will be a murder somewhere in the story. In this story there is a point where it all starts to change, the cat has had its eyes gouged out and you start to learn that the protagonist has a slight insane way about him.

Another particularly noticeable difference in the build up of tension in the 'Tell Tale' which is different to 'The Black Cat' is that Poe uses repetition throughout the story of the planning of the murder.

In 'The Black Cat' the protagonist tells you more about his past and what is in his mind; he has a more morel voice. He also uses a more sophisticated language, which gives the impression that he is a more educated man.

Overall I think that Edgar Allen Poe is a talented author due to his ability to keep the reader interested and he can write such short stories, but they can get you thinking about them for a long time.