Comparative Essay | The Tell Tale Heart & The Black Cat, Edgar Ellen Poe
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Course
Engels
Level
VWO / Gymnasium
Book
The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart
In the attached document you will find a comparative essay on the Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat written by Edgar Ellen Poe. A comparative Essay means that you compare the two books on a number of points. In this essay I compare the two books based on their plot, themes, characters and chronolog...
Comparative Essay English
The black cat & The tell tale heart
Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic author that is considered as one of the greatest American
writers of all time. Most of his works are about murder, death or obsession and
almost all conclude dark and lurid themes. So does his work called The Black Cat,
which is a short story about an alcoholic man who is driven insane by his addictive
drinking and eventually does monstrous things like killing and torturing his own cat.
Another work of Allan Poe is The Tell Tale Heart, in which the narrator kills an old
man because of his “evil” eye, but afterwards still tries to prove that he isn’t insane
but a very smart human being.
In both works we see that the narrator is a mad and crazy character, even though the
narrator in The Tell Tale Heart claims he isn’t. Both characters kill because they are
driven insane by something. In The Tell Tale Heart it is the vulture eye of the old man
while in The black cat it is the narrator’s own cat. We can see that the narrator in The
Black Cat places his anger towards something that isn’t exactly the main reason for
his irritation while the narrator of The Tell Tale Heart who directs his anger to the
object and person whom he had a major problem with.
Another difference between the characters is their development. The time that
passes in both stories is very different. Because there passes more time in The Black
Cat and because it gives us information about the childhood of the narrator we can
see that there is a lot of character development. At first the narrator loves animals, as
described in the next couple of sentences at the beginning of the story: “I was
especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of
pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding
and caressing them.” However, later on in the story, the narrator ends up killing
some cats. “My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so
much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death.”
We can see that the narrator of The Black Cat develops from a animal-lover to one
who hates animals and is prepared to kill them.
On the other hand The Tell Tale Heart doesn’t give us much information about the
character which gives us less character development.
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