Tell Tale Heart And Black Cat

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In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, the narrators both commit heinous acts, but only one is crazy. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is never in the right state of mind. He is crazy when he kills his landlord and he is still crazy when he tells the story of what happened. Although the narrator in “The Black Cat” is mentally unstable because he is under the influence of alcohol or withdrawal from alcohol when commits all these bad things, the mistreatment of his pets and the killing of his wife, he is in the right state of mind when he writes his story of what happened making him a reliable narrator. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is totally unreliable. We are questioning his sanity from the very beginning of the story. He goes out of his way to make us believe he is not mad while he is telling the story, and tells us about going out of his way to make sure others believe in his sanity. Another thing he does to make us question his sanity and reliability is that he claims to hear things a normal person would not be able to hear. And he kills an old man for no other reason than because his eye makes “his blood run cold”. The story starts out erratic, “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”(228). The narrator cannot even speak in complete sentences, or even complete thoughts here and that sends up a red flag that something might be off in his head. He claims his madness is not really madness; it is just his sharpened senses. “The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute”(228). He uses this excuse a few times in the story to explain why he hears things a normal person could not hear. He continues to go out of his way to make us believe that he is not mad throughout the story. In the beginning he tells

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