Comparing Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart And The Raven

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once said “Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy”. She has realized, likely through introspection, that all people try and discover the goal of existence and through such goals, experience many of the same emotions and lessons. Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe explores emotions such as guilt and loss in his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” and his poem, “The Raven”. The “Tell-Tale Heart” is about the experiences of the narrator attempting to convince the reader that he is not insane for murdering
In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator, haunted by an old man’s “eye of a vulture”, decides to murder the man, but whilst the murder takes place, the narrator shines light onto the man to observe his state, and seeing the “vulture eye”, the narrator's rage swelled (Poe 357). The metaphor illustrates the narrator’s hatred for the vulture eye, for he sees the eye as one of a vulture, ever looming and waiting for something to scavenge. The metaphor gives the reader knowledge of the narrator’s fractured piece of mind, indirectly characterizing the narrator, thus captivating the reader. Moreover, in the poem, “The Raven,” the narrator heeds the words from a “‘Prophet!’... ‘thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!”’, and as the bird continues to affirm his worst fears about his lost love he yells at the bird to “‘Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”’, before the man sinks into a deep depression (lines 91-101). The narrator’s comparison of the raven to a devil and a Prophet allows the reader to understand the narrator’s haunted condition as the raven grasps his emotions and manipulates his love and fear-utterly destroying him. The narrator’s frenzied view of his metaphorical jailor and his deep imprisonment by the devil raven spouting prophetic remarks about his lost love intrigues the reader, through giving the man emotions and
In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator, after murdering an old man, begins to hear “a low, dull, quick sound” with “the noise steadily” increasing; the noise, continues to grow“ louder --louder --louder” and when it progresses, the man commits to the murder (Poe 358-359). Poe’s repeated description of how the noise steadily increases emphasizes the degree to which the narrator’s conscience is threatening to burst out within him and his nagging, ever-present guilt towards the murder. It informs the reader about the narrator’s intense emotions and builds up the drama in the story. In the same vein, in the story, “The Raven” a grieving man opens a window in response to a tap and through the window “stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore”. The Raven then continues to repeat “Nevermore” to each of the man’s increasingly desperate questions about his lost lover, eventually leading him into a crippling depression. The Raven’s repeated response, Nevermore, accentuates the complete rejection of all the man’s longings for his lost love. The raven’s complete denial of the man’s hopes and the man’s acceptance of the raven’s words expresses the narrator’s complete loss of life and his acceptance of his horrid fate. Poe repeats certain phrases or events throughout his stories using parallel episodes to enhance the intense emotions of the characters and the suspense throughout