Comparing The Cask Of Amontillado And The Tell-Tale Heart

Poe was very involved in the gothic movement. He influenced gothic writing like no one else of his time. In all three of our stories “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” we can see gothicism at its finest. Poe was a master of writing in the gothic form, he did an especially wonderful job in “The Cask of Amontillado.” In “The Cask of Amontillado,” our main character is Montresor. He has a grudge against a man named Fortunato for a reason that was never explained. The only thing we know about it is that in the first sentence the story states “THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” Now this is all we know about what Fortunato’s insult that

Poe was the first author to cater to the darker side of the mindscape. His works such as The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum have been honored long after his mysterious death in Victorian England, although his writing weren’t widely recognized during his life. His works often deal with themes such as death and misery, and run on emotions regarding those. The work The Tell Tale Heart, is one of those, with the narrator’s insanity in overdrive as he murders an old man simply

Edgar Allan Poe is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant writers and masters of horrors in American literature. This can be seen in his two short stories “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale-Heart”. Both of these stories are written in first person and ends with their victim 's death. These stories contain many similarities and differences in term of the characters, theme, mood, irony, setting, confession, and the reason for committing murder.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell Tale Heart share very similar elements between both short stories. Both shared a broad similarity in the motives why the narrator plotted and killed. The reasoning for both was very ambiguous, and very mentally based. The murders weren’t for any realistic reason.

Edgar Allan Poe is an influential writer known for his eerie stories. One of Poe’s most recognized works, “The Tell Tale Heart,” published in 1843, is about a mentally ill narrator who despises an old man’s eye, so he decides to murder him. Another one of Poe’s works, “The Cask of Amontillado,” published in 1846, is about the unstable narrator, Montresor, who decides to seek revenge by murdering the man who has wronged him. Even though the two narrators are mentally unstable, the narrator's actions, the way they reveal their motives and how their conscience acts upon them greatly differ.

“The Tell-Tale Heart is about a neurotic man’s murder on an old man living in the same house because he finds the old man’s “vulture eye” unbearable to him.” (Shen) Frenzied with a voracious intent to hurt the old man with not a purposeful reason of robbing him, an unnamed man becomes bedeviled by his own mind. As a result, of this obsession, for one week he would peek into the old man’s room, ever so quietly, around twelve midnight and shine a small light upon the old man’s eye. According to Poe, “I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.” (199) Furthermore, an unnamed man was not interested in the old man’s gold or possessions, it was the old man’s “evil eye”, as he would call it, that tormented

Edgar Allan Poe is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant writers and master of horrors in American literature. This can be seen in his two short stories “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale-Heart”. Both of these stories are written in first person view and end with their victim's death. These stories contain many similarities and differences in term of the narrative, psychology, mood, irony, and setting of the story. Both of these tales have a narrator who gave ambiguous and shallow reason for their murders.

The motivation for murder according to the narrator was “not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (Poe 922). However, it is possible that the eye symbolizes a necrosis of the narrator’s spirit. The narrator uses terms such as “infuriate”, “hideous”, “vulture” and “dammed” when describing the eye (Poe 923). These words are often used to describe the demonization of individuals who commit irrational crimes against humanity, such as the crime our narrator is confessing to, the murder and dismemberment of an innocent old man in his sleep. In “The Physiognomical Meaning of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”, Edward W. Pritcher states “it

The main idea of almost every story by Edgar Allan Poe concerns death, usually because the main character is unreliable and/or mentally unstable. This is the cause of almost all of the deaths and problems that occur in the story, which I will be discussing in further detail. ¨The Raven¨, ¨The Tell-Tale Heart¨, and ¨The Cask of Amontillado¨ are only a couple out of the many horror stories Poe has written. Almost all of his stories incorporate unreliable characters, dark settings, and deadly intentions to create a suspenseful and frightening mood and atmosphere. Poe also uses many symbols in his stories. One of the most important in ¨The Raven¨, ¨The Tell-Tale Heart¨, and ¨The Cask of Amontillado¨ are the raven, the beating heart, and the amontillado, respectively. When further analyzed, one can recognize that all of these symbols connect to the insanity, unreliability, and dangers of the main characters.

While analyzing the old man’s eye, having a look at the quote “pale blue, with a film over it” (Poe 2), it helps to relate the connection between the eye and the narrators actions. The eye of the old man prevents him to see clearly i.e. somewhat blurry vision. ‘The Tell Tale Heart” is told by the narrator’s perspective, which has to be accounted for when opinions on the events come to discussion. However, the narrator believes that his actions of murdering the old man is based on the horrific vulture eye that the old man possesses. This connects back to the old man having blurry vision.

The eye is a key symbol that Poe offers again and again throughout his story. It is the reason that the narrator gives for killing the old man. The eye represents that the man thinks it shows who he really is. Soon after he suffocates the old man, he calmly states “His eye would trouble me no more.” This shows he’s mentally unstable, the fact that he killed the old man just because he didn’t like his eye. Another symbol that Poe uses throughout this suspenseful story is the floorboards. This symbol represents that you can’t hide you problems forever. Instead of facing his problems, he conceals them. On page eight, the man shouts with anxiety “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-Tear up the planks!-here, here!-it is the beating of his hideous heart!” The man’s anxiety makes him go crazy that he can’t take the guilt because his problems were hidden by him, yet they were always there because you can’t make them go

In this particular story, Poe decided to write it in the first person narrative. This technique is used to get inside the main character's head and view his thoughts and are often exciting. The narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart is telling the story on how he killed the old man while pleading his sanity. To quote a phrase

The eye of the old man hunts the narrator for day and night. Many will say that Poe was being superstitious, many culture believe in the “evil eye” in many cultures the evil eye is believed to bring bad luck and misfortune if it is laid upon you. According to Robert Kackur,The Tell-Tale Heart is about father

What would one expect when a man gets killed for having an odd body part, or even for saying a mildly rude comment? For many students, reading and understanding dark short stories is very troublesome, and with such a large influence of this theme, the need to show different aspects is substantial. The author of the short stories, “Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” is Edgar Allen Poe, an author of mystery and macabre short stories. In the “Tell-Tale Heart” and the “Cask of Amontillado”, both protagonists end up killing their victim due to small and petty things, such as an eye, or a measly offensive comment. In this analysis, I will show Edgar Allen Poe shows his unique sense of style through irony, foreshadowing, and allusion; to entertain the reader.

Both Poe and Hawthorne used symbolism to tell their stories. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe uses a number of symbols such as the old man’s eye and heart. The narrator compares the old man’s eye to the eye of a vulture. It seems dull with something like a film over it, obscuring clear vision, but at the same time it has power over the narrator. He states that the old man’s eye “the eye of a vulture….whenever