Madness

Madness

Madness
The central theme in all of Edgar Alan Poe’s stories is madness.   When reading the two stories covered in class, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, one cannot help but see Edgar Alan Poe’s different writing style.   Although the stories are similar with the madness, they are different in the way the authors madness is portrayed.   In “Tell-Tale Heart”, the madness of the author is focused more towards another individual whereas the author of “The Black Cat” is obsessed with a cat and channels his anger towards his wife.  
In “Tell-Tale Heart”, the author has a hatred for an older gentleman’s dull blue eye.   “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” (par 2).   The narrator for some reason has a real problem with the fact that the older man’s eye is blue. “The reader is left with a calm sense of simplicity, as there is no threatening problem being posed onto the narrator other than the old man's eye” (Schuessler 2).   It seems as if the only real issue he has is the fact that the man has a blue eye and why that is a problem, we never know. The fact that the narrator goes into such detail to do things so that the older man doesn’t hear or see him is a little odd.   The narrator creeps into the room at night and it takes him an hour to get into the room.   The narrator also goes into detail about how he slowly turns on the lantern so that he could see if the man’s eye was open so that he could “take his eye out”.   After a while of spying on the old man, the man finally wakes up.   He goes in and startles the old man and throws the mattress on top of him and then dismembers him.   The narrator then proceeds to hide the body in the floor. “ I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings” (par 13).   The narrator felt proud of...