“The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are two of the most horrific masterpieces in literature. Edgar Allen Poe was a writer who knew how to capture his reader with bone chilling horror. Despite the many differences, analyzing the true meaning reveals many similarities. The characters in both “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” display their unstable minds, attempt to rationalize their crimes, show the reader the true horror of what they have done, and cannot escape their guilt for their crimes.
The characters in both “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” display their unstable minds. In The Black Cat the character explains that even he would not believe the events to be from someone to be sane, “FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.” To prove his sanity he goes on to say that he is kind and respects the friendship of the black cat. That he loves pets. That he likes to hang out with them. The character has a lot of conscious and unconscious feeling that motivate him to behave as he does in the story. He does not really understand all of these motivations, his own behaviors, and the reasons for the action that he takes at a great extent. And the psychological basis for the horror is that he starts getting afraid with the new cat because the cat keeps following him everywhere he goes. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the character believes that he is nervous, but he is not mad. He believes his madness is not his madness but a keen sense of hearing. However he believes that we all probably think that he is insane, even though is not true. the character believes that, ” the low dull, quick sound-much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton is the song of the old man’s beating heart.”
Both characters show how insane they are by attempting to rationalize their crimes. They both attempt to explain with precise details that the reasons in which they