Compare the two nineteenth century horror stories ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-tale heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe, showing how Poe uses a range of techniques to make his stories dramatic and effective.
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author who wrote ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-tale Heart’. ‘The Black Cat’ written in 1845 depicts a supposedly animal loving man who becomes addicted to alcohol which eventually gets out of control and he ends up killing his cat and wife. ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ was written in 1950 after Poe’s wife’s death in 1847, portrays a madman who becomes paranoid about an old mans vulture like eye and similarly to ‘The Black Cat’ he kills the old man. In both stories Poe uses a variety of techniques to convey his dramatic version of the gothic horror genre. He uses repetition through the rule of three, punctuation and simple sentences, settings and pathetic fallacy, the main homodiegetic narrator and innocent side characters as well as some significant supernatural events. These all help achieve the effective, dramatic gothic horror story.