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The Cask Of Amontillado And The Tell Tale Heart Analysis

Decent Essays

Edgar Allan Poe is a prominent writer who wrote many peculiar and uncanny short stories and poems. One of the stories Poe wrote, “The Tell Tale Heart,” published in 1843, is about a narrator who is paranoid about an old man’s eye, so he decides to eradicate it. Another story by Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado,” published in 1846, is about a narrator who seeks revenge on his friend because, in the past, he was insulted by him. Both stories contain narrators, which are mentally unstable, but the narrator’s traits, their motives for the murder, and how their guilt is exhibited differ.
The narrators in the two stories both possess similar traits, but some aspects of each narrator are distinct. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” the narrator is …show more content…

Along with the narrator’s having contrasting traits, their motives for murder were different also.
Both narrators had nonsensical motives for murdering the victim, but they were different in a few ways. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” the narrator absolutely despises the old man’s eye. When the narrator says, “Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me an insult” (105), the reader presumes that the narrator would never do anything to hurt the old man. But, the way the narrator describes the eye, “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” (105) shows the reader just how much the narrator hated the man’s eye. The quote also reveals to the reader a reason why the narrator could potentially do harm unto the old man. Even though the narrator had nothing against the old man except for his bothersome eye, he acted impulsively and killed the old man because he could not stand the eye any longer. Conversely, the narrator from “The Cask of Amontillado” killed the man because he hated the man. For instance the excerpt, “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge” (75) shows that the narrator, Montresor, is planning revenge on Fortunato because of an insult he said.

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