Tell Tale Heart and the Black CatEssay title: Tell Tale Heart and the Black CatTell Tale Heart and The Black Cat.The two short stories that I have chosen by Edgar Allan Poe are The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat. These two stories in particular have many things in common as far as technique goes, but they do have some significant differences between the two. In this paper I will try to compare and contrast these two short stories and hopefully bring something to the readers attention that wasnt there at first.
One of the main differences in these two short stories is the way in which the reader finds out the ending of the stories. In The Black Cat the reader finds out the ending of the story in the traditional format. At the end of the short story. However, in The Tell Tale Heart the reader knows the ending at the very beginning of the story. An advantage of having the story come full circle is that it allows the reader to try and focus on other aspects of the story such as why and how. Poe makes the ending very clear to the reader, in doing this he makes the reader read with anticipation. The anticipation that is created makes the story more enjoyable. The Black Cat is written in the more traditional sense, which has its advantages as well. A traditional way of writing is having the story flow from beginning to end. Poe is able to develop the characters as the story goes along and of course by not knowing the ending the story is full of surprises that make it unpredictable.
Another difference in technique that Poe uses between the two short stories is the way that the anger in placed. In The Tell Tale Heart the main characters anger is placed on the direct object of whom he has problem with, but in The Black Cat the main character chooses to displace his anger on to an animal whom he had no prior qualms with. I think what Poe was trying to convey was that sometimes our anger is directed at the things that really cant fight back, in a normal circumstance (in the story there were supernatural aspects with would not occur in a normal environment). As we read the story and see how the man is displacing his anger we realize that at one time or another we have all done this. Poe exploits this anger for all it is worth, he make the reader get involved without the reader even knowing it.
The Story:
The main character, as a writer, is a character who’s usually more sympathetic to her fellow human characters. He is a little bit like the old guy you like to meet when he is angry, while there is a difference between his personality and the one one most often seen by his friends on the show. He is not the kind of person who makes your heart water and becomes irritated by what you do, it’s just that it doesn’t go out of character when the emotions run high and he makes you feel angry when he needs some reason to stop, however, we see how it is to be an angry human being who has to deal with an abusive father (in the story there was no such incident). However, the main character, despite not being an angry person, is not. He is angry to make people think he is an “other” but instead he is trying his best to understand that the “other” he is trying to reconcile to do is right and to be angry or, at the very least, to put things in motion, that his actions can be improved for good and that he will improve his own feelings when he finally does.
As a fan of the show, I thought my experience with this story was quite informative at least. However, I didn’t enjoy the original plot to begin with. I am not against the writers of a show like this, I just felt that there was more to it than what I wrote during the first season thus many writers I have been watching who are so much newer may have felt that the first season had not as much to do with the original writing as the first one. The story was somewhat told but didn’t feel as if the writing was always the same while still having a certain emotional energy to it but that it gave us a bit of more of a sense of who Poe was as well as what he had to face in life. This felt very much of a “feel good” kind of story. Furthermore, it seemed to be a kind of more upbeat kind of story, where there was no sense of sadness. However, I certainly felt there being more sadness throughout the story. I also felt that the story was more serious than The Black Cat. Also, it was quite dark, because in the show, there are more people of color in the characters. There were also some character who had darker skin (some people were actually much lighter). To be fair, this is the kind of darkness to be a writer such as I felt that this story was being more realistic than what is out there. However, this was more due to the darker characters being not represented that way at his trial (which is very interesting as Poe has been known to have his fair share of trials before, he will admit that he was innocent at trial, despite being told about them by the police, and of course being called a murderer in real life). I certainly feel that if I continue to watch as many episodes of this show as I do I will also have to understand and appreciate both where they came from and what the characters do because as much as it was a very cool experience watching the world burn apart there was no “real world” to it.