The Formuliac Narrators of Edgar Allan Poe
The respective narrators in Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat are nameless characters around whom each story revolves. This is just as well, considering the fact that the two narrators are almost interchangeable. Both narrators are thematic symbols of the dark side of the human mind, which characterizes much of Poe's works of horror. Each narrator moves through the action of his story virtually parallel to the other, in his struggles with irrational fear, innate perversity and obsessive mental fixations. Although Poe does insert a few added dramatic elements into the story of The Black Cat, these elements pull the two characters closer together, instead of pushing them apart. The reader can still easily see each man follow the same path through his narration: he becomes consumed by his irrational fear, then obsesses over the object which is the manifestation of this fear, which then pushes him to violence against those associated with the obsession. Poe brings the reader full circle, using similar language and actions within both plots, taking both narrators to the height of their madness and seeming triumph, which in the end, is their undoing.Both stories are narrated through the distorted eyes of a ch
This horrible combination of the human mind is what is behind the Black Cat narrator's actions when he "in cool blood," "slipped a noose about [the cat's] neck and hung it to the limb of a tree (p322), " and when in "a rage more than demoniacal," (p327) buried an axe in his wife's head because she tried to protect the cat. The Tell-Tale narrator states, "I loved the old man (p277), when speaking of the same man that he resolves to kill just six lines later. " The narrator then goes on to relay how, each night, for seven nights, he would carefully sneak into the room of the old man to wait for him to open his "vulture eye (p278)," thus pushing the narrator to his climatic act of murder. This perverse sense of satisfaction and triumph is what trips both narrators up in the end of their stories, as their meticulous plans unravel before their eyes. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart addresses question of his sanity twice in the first paragraph: asking once of the reader, "why will you say that I am mad?" and then again asking, "How, then, am I mad (p277)?" His defense lies in "how healthily - how calmly [he] can tell [the reader] the whole story. Once again reminding the reader of his acute senses, the Tell-Tale narrator thinks he hears the beating of the old man's heart. He then goes on to gloat of how he first "dismembered the corpse," then hid its pieces under the floor planks "so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye - not even his - could have detected any thing wrong (p280). At first, it "increased [his] fury, as the beating of the drum stimulates the soldier into courage (p279). " Through the narrator's words, Poe presents the dark side of the human mind, where you "do wrong for the wrong's sake only (p322). The Tell-Tale narrator, "in the wild audacity of [his] perfect triumph (p281)," sits directly over the floor planks under which the corpse of the old man lies. " Poe's formula for horror is apparent in these two stories. This sound, which excited him to "uncontrollable terror" before, now drives him into an uncontrollable fit of paranoia and to confession, as he shrieks, "I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! Here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart (p282)!" The Black Cat narrator shows the same audacity, as he too, disturbs the ready-made tomb of his wife. He admits that it is "impossible to say how first the idea entered [his] brain; but once conceived, it haunted [him] day and night (p277). It is indicated that he was at one point, a seemingly happy man.
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