According to the documentary The Mystery of Edgar Allen Poe When Poe found a job it didn’t last him long until he would be looking for another job. Poe didn’t have the money to pay the medical bills for Virginia when she was sick. Poe never grew up with biological father since his father abandon his family at a young age. Also Poe’s foster father never wanted to deal with Poe since they adopted him. All through Poe’s life he never had any kids of his own even after being together with three different women. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) thematically posits domestic violence as the result of an early 19th century husband’s failure to fulfill two patriarchal responsibilities: to biologically reproduce and to satisfy the family’s material needs.…
In this story, Poe wrote about a young man who kills his employee because his glass eye irritated him. In the beginning of the story, the narrator, who later turns into the murder, did not have any reasons to murder his employee since he never did anything harmful to the narrator. Nonetheless, The narrator had a strong urge to kill his employee and he justifies it by claiming that the victims glass eye compelled him. When readers read this story, they realize that Poe focus heavily on the conflict that the narrator has within himself when contemplating murdering the…
In the tale, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe tells the story of how the narrator who was assumed to be mad for killing an old man. The old man has an eye like a vulture and the narrator said this old man’s eye is an evil eye; according to the story he said “one of his eyes resembled that of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (39). The story shows guilt and emotional breakdown, but sometimes feel emotional disturbance.…
"No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal- the redness and the horror of blood" (1). Edgar Allan Poe was a master of the macabre; his very stories injecting fear into the hearts of his readers. Poe's life was filled with tragedy, as several of the important women in his life, including his wife and daughter died at a young age. He utilized poems and books to express that tragedy. The short stories, "The Black Cat," and, "The Masque of the Red Death," both written by Poe, enhance the theme of fear. "The Black Cat," was about a narrator who had gone crazy and was so overcome by guilt that he went to extreme measures including…
Edgar Allan Poe, reputed as the father of American short stories, is a poet, writer and literary critic of nineteenth century. His works, most of which explore the dark side of consciousness and subconsciousness of human beings, was well-known for horror and mystery. "The Black Cat" is one of Poe's masterpieces. It depicts love, hatred and fear between men through the narration of the changing relationship between a mentally abnormal man and a black cat. Loneliness, death, torture and abnormal psychology are core elements in "The Black Cat" This thesis aims to conduct a research on how Allan Poe managed to achieve psychological horror in "The Black Cat."…
His most well know works showcased his depression, in both The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat he showed how his sadness had driven him to insanity. In both these stories, the unnamed narrator, Poe says that he has an unexplainable hatred toward something in The Tell Tale Heart he when contemplating why he wanted the old man dead he stated “He had the eye of a vulture -- a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold” this shows that the narrator is not mentally stable as he wants to kill a man just because of the way his eye…
The problems of alcoholism and insanity are recurring themes in Poe’s literary works. One can say that “The Black Cat,” one of Poe’s short stories, portrays much of the author’s own views on his substance abuse problems and mental illness. The unnamed narrator from “The Black Cat,” struggles with his addiction to alcohol and his hatred for two cats become prevailing. The narrator states, however, that he was never like this before he loved animals, “never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.” (Poe, 3). The narrator takes on a cat and cares for it, however, as his drinking problem progressed, he states, “I grew day by day more moody… my disease grew upon me.” (Poe, 4). After a night out drinking, he decides to cut out one of the cat’s eyes and ultimately, kills the cat. Later, another cat strangely identical to the first cat with one eye comes around and as the narrator tries to kill the second cat he ends up killing his wife instead. He buries the body of his wife and the second cat behind a wall and police later hear the cat calling out from inside the wall. In relation to Poe’s life, Poe was known to love cats and had a female cat named Catterina (Mercier). The killing of the first cat relates to Poe’s own destruction of the things he loved and desired due to alcoholism. He lost his job in 1837 due to his drinking and feuding with other editors (Edgar Allan Poe, Encyclo.) The killing of an innocent wife can closely relate to Poe’s views of women in his own life, through the deaths of both his mother figures and then eventually his wife. Poe writes about women who carry a unique beauty to them. The women are compassionate to the men they…
The books of Edgar Allen Poe can spark many thoughts in a reader’s mind. Specifically, Edgar Allan Poe uses imagery in his short stories “Ligeia” and “Tell Tale Heart” to depict the narrator’s obsession with eyes. This infatuation with eyes roots from the narrator's insanity and his obsessive personality. The eyes are significant to the stories because they are used to give the audience a deeper understanding of the narrator himself. The eyes are thought to be “the window to the soul”. This statement explains how Poe could have wanted to express what he saw in the other characters by describing their eyes. Poe is able to express this obsession to eyes more predominant in the plot and uses it to help the reader better picture the narrator.…
The human mind is difficult to understand as every human possesses his/her own individual thought rituals at different levels of complexities. From a psychological approach the point(s) to get across are to reveal the revelation of its author’s mind and personality. In other words, how the literature is linked with the author’s mental and emotional characteristics. Today, psychology has been introduced in most everything. Before the field of Psychology was introduced an American author, Edgar Allan Poe, was deeply aware of the complexities of the human mind and its effects on behavior. His comprehension of the human brain is embedded in short stories such as, “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Edgar Allan Poe presents protagonists…
The one detail we are told about the old man is that “He had the eye of a vulture” (Poe, 1589). The narrator only described the old man by his eye. It astonishes me that he choice to describe the old man by just a single physical trait, an eye. The eye must stand for something as the narrator continues to talk about his eye throughout the story. Calling it the “evil eye” (Poe, 1590), describing it as “all a dull blue, with a…
In the story “ The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. In this story there is a mix of insanity,illness, and substance that goes along with this story. In this story there’s a man that dislikes anothers mans eye. Therefor his eye is so bad to him that he feels it's necessary to kill the man. It takes a complete week for him to accomplish the task of killing him. Each day he sneaks into the man's home and stares at him hours upon hours waiting for the perfect opportunity. Finally on the eighth day he finally kills…
The narrator is increasing the terror and madness by making the screams scarier. The child cries starts as a soft whimpering sound. It happens so much, escalating “howl” loud and fully mature noise; puts in an “inhuman” howl like it was a beast down in the hole with half terror and half triumph. The madness and terror increases so much that the author questions if the howls are from hell by demons.…
By having the eye torment the narrator until he viciously murders the old man, Poe is bringing a supernatural aspect into "The Tell-Tale Heart." The narrator's hatred for the old man's eye is unexplainable, and the narrator himself does not even know why he came up with the idea, "It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain," (GB, pg. 74). This eye almost possesses the narrator, becoming the driving force of his insanity. Another aspect of the supernatural at work in Poe's story is when the narrator hears the beating of the old man's heart in his own ears. It's obviously impossible to hear the beating in the intensity at which the narrator describes it, "the sound would be heard by a neighbor," (GB, pg. 76), but Poe adds this sentence to enhance the story's supernatural aspect. Right after the narrator killed the old man, he could still hear the heart beating, again this feat is impossible, "for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound," (GB, pg. 76). Even after the beating stopped, according to the narrator, it began again, once the police arrived. Poe makes it clear that the beating heart is not just the narrator listening to his own heart, or imagining the sound in his head, "until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears," (GB, pg. 77). An unexplainable noise that grows louder and louder can only be…
The narrators madness is ultimately conveyed through his unrealistic rational to kill the old man because of his opposition toward his eye. Similarly, another one of Poe’s stories, The Black Cat, lacks logic and reason, conveying the narrator’s madness, where the narrator kills his cat that he claims to love. In both the stories, the narrators commit atrocious crimes towards objects they love, without a normal motive to do so. As they both try to convince the reader of their sanity, they are ultimately conveyed as mad due to their lack of logic and…
“The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a traumatizing story about a person who murdered an innocent old man because he thought that his eye was evil. The story states that the narrator was afraid of the eye and that is why he wanted to rid himself of it. The narrator had many signs of being proven to go to jail or to go to a mental hospital.…