Comparing The Tell Tale Heart And The Cask Of Amontillado

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Poe Essay Many tragedies in Edgar Allan Poe’s life left him lovesick and depressed, and compelled him to write about tales of beauty, love, and loss. In two of his short stories, The Tell Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado, Poe demonstrates his depression with murder, revenge, and madness through his writing. The theme of The Tell Tale Heart might be guilt or madness, also containing the theme of a corpse interred in a house. In The Cask of Amontillado, the narrator’s theme was about his ability to carry out a chilling plot of revenge against his offender. While the Poe stories are different in several ways, the similarities of the text are greater. Let’s begin with a similarity of murder, not only do they both commit[->0] [->1]murder[->2], but they also suffer endless turmoil and escape eternal punishment. Poe's characters in both The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado consist of murder by…show more content…
In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator suffocates the old man with the bed, “... I dismembered the corpse... then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye --not even his --could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out... I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all --ha! ha!” (Poe 3). During The Cask of Amontillado, he “had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off... I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain... I ceased my labors and sat down upon the bones. Then at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier.” (Poe
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