‘A Confession found in a Prison’ is written to be read out to an audience by a narrator in first person. The motives and ideas of the murderer are different in comparison to The Tell-Tale Heart. He does not seem to be mad, and has a clear reason for committing the murder. The reader is given a large amount of detail and background information about the setting and story before the murder. In the story the killer feels guilt and tells the whole true story as to “set down the naked truth without disguise” and so let him die without any secrets as he is to be executed the next morning. The killer in A Confession killed a young boy, his nephew; he hated his sister-in-law, the boy’s mother, as he felt she always watched him, “I felt that she overlooked me always”. He was extremely scared of this woman as he felt that she could always see his sins that he has committed. The young boy only troubled him because he felt he was the same as his mother and had the same distrust of him. “was his mother’s image in face and spirit, and always mistrusted me”. He felt his nephews eyes always looked at him menacingly and this was his motive to kill him.
In The Tell-Tale Heart the victim of the brutal murder is an old man. The motive here is similar to A Confession as the old man’s eye haunts and provokes the murderer, “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture... Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold”. In each short story the motive has a link to eyes. Both the killers have a fear and yet an attraction to the eyes of the victim. The eyes became a burden to the men and “by degrees” to get rid of the eyes the victim must be killed. In the Tell-Tale Heart the murderer mentions it is not the old man he hates, it’s his eyes. Also another link is that both murders are planned or premeditated. The killers both knew when the murders were going to take place. “I felt no weariness or fatigue, but waited patiently” and “I had waited a long time, very patiently”. These quotes are evidence of the knowledge of the murders they were going to commit.
When the victims in the stories have been killed both killers decide to bury the bodies. The man from The Tell-Tale Heart dismembers the body and hides it under the floorboards whereas the man from A Confession buries the child’s body in some newly laid turf in the grounds of his house. In the Tell-Tale Heart the killer is questioned very quickly as there is a cry heard from the old man. This could create panic to the killer but with confidence of his murder and job of hiding the body, he lets police men into his house. This is different to A Confession, where the man is seen to fret over the boy and his disappearance for a matter of days, but is actually fretting over the possibility of getting caught and the dead boy found. On the day that the boy is found he sits on top of the grave with a chair, but this is because he is scared somebody will find the corpse. This is unlike The Tell-Tale Heart police officers are called and the murderer is so confident initially that he shows the police officers around without faltering as he is so sure that he has hidden the body sufficiently. When the police officers want to talk with the man, he is so confident that “in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed the seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse”, he sits right on top of the body, and this is another interesting link between the behaviour of each killer, they both sit upon the body. “being assured that nobody could disturb it now without my knowledge” this quote is from the killer in A Confession who sits upon the grave with friends around so he can protect his guilt. In this point in both stories the killers are in the same situation, they are safe as nobody know that they murdered anybody. The people don’t suspect the young boy’s uncle and the police are satisfied that the mad man is telling the truth as he is so confident.
The way the murderer is brought to justice in one story is very different compared to the other. At the beginning of the story the killer in A Confession feels guilty for what he has done, yet it was not his own guilt that got him caught. A pair of bloodhounds jump over the wall into the garden of the man and begin to tear at the seat where the man covers the ground that hides the body. The bloodhounds tear up the ground and the murderer confesses to the murder.
In The Tell-Tale Heart the murderer at the beginning feels no guilt or regret for what he has done, yet when the situation is going so well his conscience gets the better of him. He hears a ringing in his ears, which builds up to a loud heartbeat. He thinks that it’s the old man’s heartbeat which he thinks the police officers can hear (it is probably actually his own heartbeat, a sign of his guilty conscience). The tension builds up and eventually the man confesses to the murder as he thinks that the police can hear the man’s heartbeat and know he did it. In both stories there is an interesting contrast between the thought of the killer at the start of the story and the reason they got caught. It is opposite reasons in each story.
In A Confession the punctuation such as exclamation marks are not that common as it is more of an account that a descriptive story. However in The Tell-Tale Heart there are 25 exclamation marks in the last 12 lines, which give it a mad and frantic feel to the end of the story, which in turn corresponds to the insanity and irregular behaviour of the killer and his plot. The reason for the killer to write the story was to prove he wasn’t mad, but this is ironic because he obviously is mad. In A Confession his reason or motive for writing his confession is so he can die with not sins or without guilt.
