The Narrators in Poes Short Stories Tell-Tale Heart and Black Cat - Thesis Example

No: The narrators in each of Poe’s short stories “The Tell Tale Heart “and |The Black Cat” subconsciously want to get caught The short stories, “Black Cat” and “Tell Tale Heart” put forward Poe’s consideration of terror and the connection of conscious and subconscious mind. Both the stories are narrated by unknown narrators who inform at the very beginning of the paper that they are not insane or mad and as a proof of their sanity, they put forward the stories of their crime and how they get caught. Their narration appears divided into conscious and subconscious and the stories reveal that the narrators fight with their inner terror and externalized their terror by targeting some object. This targeted object as per the narrators should be annihilated and get rid of. However, even after annihilating the targeted objects, the narrators are unable to take over the terror they feel inside themselves. Eventually, their subconscious gets powerful and makes them get caught for the crimes they have committed. This paper compares the two short stories in order to evaluate as to how the narrators of both the stories subconsciously want to get caught for their crimes they have committed. The narrator in “The Black Cat” informs about his love and care towards pets and his favorite among his pets is the black cat. However, when he gets married, things start changing for him. He started to get intensely drunk and abuse towards his wife and his pets. In his aggression, he plucks out an eye of his favorite cat and eventually hangs it on a tree. Afterwards, he starts hallucinating by another black cat due to which, he murders his wife and conceals her dead body inside the wall. When he is suspected by the police, he takes them to the spot of his wife’s corpse’s concealment and discloses about his guilt and finds the hallucinating black cat on the head of the corpse. “Tell Tale Heart” also has a narrator who gets disturbed because of eye of an old man considering it evil and harassing. He has no issue or reservations against the old man, but with his eye due to which, he kills him one night and hides his body under the floor boards after dismembering him. When police reaches at the spot, he reveals about his crime because he is terrorized inside. Both the stories inform about reasonless murders by the narrators who have felt terror and aggression towards certain objects. In “The Black Cat”, the terrifying object is the black cat while in the “Tell Tale Heart”, the terrifying object is the eye of the old man. After conducting the crime of murder, the narrators are unable to keep the truth to themselves. Their subconscious seems to have taken control of their conscious selves (Wiratningsih 18). Firstly, their crimes appear to show perverseness, then their subconscious did not allow them to hide their guilt and moves them towards self-destruction. Ho-Yan says that in “Black Cat”, “Crime is eventually discovered when he reveals the truth to the police unconsciously…… There is an outburst of the unconscious, the evil that seeks his way to speak of himself. It inevitably leads to his self-destruction” (Yo-Han 29-30). The narrators of both the stories show that his conscious and subconscious have a fight with each other. In the story, “"Black Cat", the good and the evil co-exist inside the narrator, and we se the triumph of the evil when the narrator is in an unconscious/a drunken state” (Ho-Yan 35-36). The conscious self of the narrator gets suppressed while his subconscious gets empowered and is successful. The good side of the human being is concealed and the adverse one appears in the forefront. The revelation of the guilt and the narrator attempt to disclose the crime was clear from the fact that both the narrator appeared more than required friendly with the policemen and showed them the whole houses to ensure that they would find nothing in the house. The narrators made themselves doubtful by accommodating the policemen extensively and by talking to them without requirement. When the narrator of “Tell Tale Heart” was asked about the cry and old man, he told lies to the policemen and then he said, “I took them through the whole house, telling them to search it all, to search well.” (Poe 67). Afterwards, he talked to them a lot. His talking and making them search the whole house, all made him doubtful for his guilt. Similar is the case with the narrator of “The Black Cat”. The policemen after searching were going to leave, when the narrator got in trouble to make them catch him. “I felt myself driven by some unknown inner force to let them know, to make them know, that I had won the battle.” (Poe 37). His subconscious self made him to disclose his crime and he also talked without requirement. Standing in front of the wall where he hid the corpse of his wife, he made the officers know about something doubtful. The doubt that the narrator created in the minds of unsuspecting policemen along with their confession of the crime can be regarded as enough reasoning to admit that the narrators were not sane or conscious. Whatever they did, did with a subconscious and insane state. Bynum informs, “The confession of the crime, I conceive, may be considered as an evidence of insanity of considerable weight” (75). Confession in itself if unjustified and unsuspected appears to be sign of subconscious of the narrators. In both the stories, the narrators through their narrated stories want to reveal something. “The mentally disturbed murderers want to convince their auditors of the reasonableness of their crimes” (Zimmerman 149). There is no reason for the crime that the two narrators conducted, however, there is a fight between conscious and subconscious mind due to which, and the narrators face self-destruction as well as the destruction of others. The short stories, “The Black Cat” and “Tell Tale Heart” both have narrators who appear in a conflict occurring between conscious and subconscious minds and eventually, subconscious mind wins the battle. The narrators murdered people and animals and then informed the unsuspecting police officers about their guilt by heightening their doubts and finally getting caught. Works Cited Bynum, P. M. “Observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story”: Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. pp. 69-79. Ma, Ho-Yan. The Art of Gothic Terror: a study of Edgar Allan Poes tales. Diss. The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, 1999. Poe, E. A. “Tell Tale Heart”. Edgar Allan Poe: Storyteller. US: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 2013. p. 64-67. Poe, E. A. “The Black Cat”. Edgar Allan Poe: Storyteller. US: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 2013. pp. 34-37 Wiratningsih, Riah. Mystery as Seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories The Fall of The House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat. Diss. Universitas Sebelas Maret, 2003. Zimmerman, B. (2009). Frantic Forensic Oratory: Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. pp. 143- 152. Read More