Ms.Zipf
English 9
11, November 2012
Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
In Poe’s short stories the main characters are usually insane. There similar to one another because they think that that there sane but in reality there not sane. In the story the main character took some ones life due to ridiculous reasons. The narrators of Poe’s stories attempt to convince the readers that they are sane, however their thoughts and behaviors contradict those claims.
In the beginning of “The Black Cat” the main character kills his cat for no reason at all. He claims he is sane when he says “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?” (The Black Cat #201) When he is trying to convince the reader that he is sane, he says this while he is hanging his cat. “Hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; - hung it because I knew that it had loved me.” (The Black Cat #201) If tears were streaming down his eyes while he was killing his cat he knew that he was doing, he killed his cat Pluto because the cat loved him. No sane person would ever think of doing that or understand that concept.
In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe the main character wants to kill a man because he had a lazy eye. Through the story he has been telling the reader that he is sane. He had a disease that had sharpened his senses and he sees everything. Even a tiny speck of dust! “He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” (The Tell-Tale Heart #1) He has made up a plan to kill an innocent man that did nothing wrong to him because of his eye. He is obviously not sane. Every night he would go into the old man’s house and open the door very carefully and watch him sleep, after two weeks straight of stalking him he finally decided to kill him . “With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him.” (The Tell-Tale Heart #2) No normal person would ever kill a human being because of their eye, that ridiculous.
In the short