Comparative Essay - Building Tension in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat"
Comparative Essay – The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat
Through most of his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe uses many different devises to create tension. Some of which he uses repeatedly making it easy to find similarities between the building up of tension and suspense in his texts, as well as differences. The ways Poe does this vary between the narrator’s sanity, including its cruelty after committing a crime and the sense of guilt afterwards, to the use of literary devices such as anaphora. Two short stories that can be compared in this aspect are “The Tall-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.”
There are particular ways in which Poe builds the tension in “The Black Cat” that he does not use in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the first place, the narrator of this short story has a great importance in the effect the story produces in the reader, and particularly in how the tension is built. Poe description of the narrator and his actions are evidence of this. To begin with, the story begins with the narrator about to be executed for the crimes he committed that he proceeds to explain. It can be said that he intends to confess his crimes to an unbiased audience, attempting to be guilt-free when he dies: “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” It can be suggested, that this way to present the story and its main character is Poe’s way to create in the audience a sense of intrigue, maybe asking themselves: why is this man about to die?, and why he says that he expects no one to believe him?, “I neither expect nor solicit belief.” Furthermore, it is plausible that Poe attempted to create tension by the way in which the narrator committed the crime of killing. The murderer was cruel, heartless, savage, and even inhuman. Firstly in the way he killed his once beloved cat Pluto, “I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree.” And then saying why he did this: “hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin.” In addition,
Through most of his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe uses many different devises to create tension. Some of which he uses repeatedly making it easy to find similarities between the building up of tension and suspense in his texts, as well as differences. The ways Poe does this vary between the narrator’s sanity, including its cruelty after committing a crime and the sense of guilt afterwards, to the use of literary devices such as anaphora. Two short stories that can be compared in this aspect are “The Tall-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.”
There are particular ways in which Poe builds the tension in “The Black Cat” that he does not use in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the first place, the narrator of this short story has a great importance in the effect the story produces in the reader, and particularly in how the tension is built. Poe description of the narrator and his actions are evidence of this. To begin with, the story begins with the narrator about to be executed for the crimes he committed that he proceeds to explain. It can be said that he intends to confess his crimes to an unbiased audience, attempting to be guilt-free when he dies: “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” It can be suggested, that this way to present the story and its main character is Poe’s way to create in the audience a sense of intrigue, maybe asking themselves: why is this man about to die?, and why he says that he expects no one to believe him?, “I neither expect nor solicit belief.” Furthermore, it is plausible that Poe attempted to create tension by the way in which the narrator committed the crime of killing. The murderer was cruel, heartless, savage, and even inhuman. Firstly in the way he killed his once beloved cat Pluto, “I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree.” And then saying why he did this: “hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin.” In addition,