Madness In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Black Cat

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Millions of thoughts race through our minds. Thousands of feelings charge through our hearts. Some of them are good, others are bad. It’s only when we act out the bad ones that we experience what the narrators of two of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories had. Grief. Consequences. Fear. Madness. In the stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, both narrators realize their acts were wrong, but they did them anyway by rationalizing that they were driven by circumstance. In summary, The Tell-Tale Heart is about a man who is compelled to kill a friendly old man because of his one ‘evil’ eye. On the eighth night of sneaking cautiously into the old man’s bedroom, he sees that the eye is open, which then causes him to commit the murder. He conceals the body by putting it under the floorboards, and relishes in his accomplished deed. Later, when police look through the house after a neighbor reported a scream, the man invites them to sit and …show more content…
The eye is a key symbol that Poe offers again and again throughout his story. It is the reason that the main character gives for killing the old man. On page three of the story, the narrator says, “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold…” The eye is a symbol of his insanity, as it can see through him and knows who he really is. Another symbol mentioned throughout the text is the floorboards. After killing the old man, the narrator conceals the body under the floorboards. On page eight the mad-man says, “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the planks!-here, here!-it is the beating of his hideous heart!’” The planks in this quote are the floorboards, which represent the fact that you can’t hide your problems. Whether it be his madness or the corpse of the old man, the narrator cannot keep it hidden. As shown, these symbols aid the author in developing the
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