Insanity and Guilt in Edgar Allen Poe's Stories (Essay Sample)

In the stories "The Black Cat," "The Imp of Perverse," and "Tell-Tale Heart" by  Edgar Allen Poe, he discusses his way of handling criminal insanity and the consequences of conscious guilt. These stories include characters affected by evil which gives them the desire to commit brutal acts. This eventually leads them to respond to pity or sympathy, which causes them to have guilt at the end of the story. The evil involved in each of the stories includes the black cat, the vulture's eye, and the spirit of perverseness. In addition, the stories "Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "The Imp of The Perverse" all use a supernatural element to portray insanity and conscious guilt to create a theme of horror and violence.

In "Tell-Tale Heart," Poe establishes that the young man has an obsession with the old man's eye. He repeats the word vulture eye constantly throughout the story. It starts with the narrator saying he loved the older man, although it causes him to kill the older man because of his vulture eye. In the second paragraph, the narrator says, "He had the eye of the vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it," showing that the narrator has an obsession with the vulture eye. Although as the story progresses, the narrator slowly becomes more insane and says, "I made up my mind to take the old man's life, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." This shows that the eye manipulates the narrator, causing him to plot and murder the older man. As the story unfolds, the narrator seems to ignore the older man's vulture eye and becomes increasingly obsessed with the older man's beating heart. He says that the old man's heart makes just a "low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton." Although the sound of the old man's heart grows increasingly louder to a "hellish tattoo," making the narrator more furious. Eventually, the beating of the heart makes the narrator so angry that he kills the older man. It says, "In an instant, I dragged him to the floor and pulled the heavy bed over him." After he killed the old man, he mentions the eye saying, "His eye would trouble me no more." He then ends up hiding the body under three planks. It then says that three police officers show up, and they start talking to the narrator, who is calm and seems innocent. Although, as he keeps talking to the police, he slowly becomes paler and begins talking with a higher-pitched voice. He then says, "It was a low, dull, quick sound." He said this same thing when he first heard the older man's heartbeat. He constantly repeats that the noise is getting louder and louder, causing him to become more insane and have conscious guilt. He then admits to the cops that he killed the old man saying, "Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!" The obsession with the vulture eye and the heart makes the character commit brutal acts, making the narrator realize the murder he committed. The narrator's conscious guilt ends up bothering and torturing him to the point where it patiently makes him insane until he confesses his guilt which is seen at the end of the story.

The story "The Imp of the Perverse" has a narrator who has the urge to do the wrong thing in any given situation to prove that he can do horrible things. The impulse is compared to an imp (a small demon) which leads an otherwise decent person into mischief and occasionally to death. 

In "The Black Cat," Ki mentions that "Poe's narrator is "mad" because his behavior deviates from all the moral maxims in traditional ethics." The narrator began by saying he was a loving and caring person, although his habit of drinking alcohol causes him to be moodier. The narrator says, "I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others." His ethics were on the side of madness and chaos1. The alcohol causes him to become abusive to his pets, including Pluto. One night the narrator goes home intoxicated and thinks that Pluto is ignoring him, so he grabs him just to be bitten on the hand, leading to him cutting the cat's eye. The narrator is overwhelmed by the spirit of perverseness, causing him to kill Pluto as it says, "I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree." Even though it is said that the narrator killed Pluto, it comes to haunt him. The first time he experiences Pluto is when he sees a group of neighbors around a wall that remains standing. The words "strange!" and "singular!" from the crowd brings curiosity to the narrator. As he approaches the crowd, he sees a figure of a cat. That cat reminds the narrator of his old cat, pluto, as it looks exactly like him. Eventually, he keeps seeing the cat and tries to explain to himself that it is all in his mind, but ends up saying, "For months, I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat." As the story progresses, it shows the narrator drunk again, and he sees a black cat that resembles Pluto. He takes it home, treats it well, and eventually, the pattern begins again where he gets hatred for the cat. One day the narrator almost trips over the cat causing him to enrage. So the narrator grabs an ax to attack the cat, but his wife defends the animal. The interference and rage lead to the narrator burying the ax in her head. Like "Tell-Tale Heart," he hides his wife's body, as it says, "I determined to wall it up in the cellar -- as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims," thereby hiding the body. On the fourth day after his wife's hiding, the police arrive; it is said that the narrator doesn't seem suspicious. Although he begins tapping on the wall, his wife's body is behind. A long, loud cry is heard from behind the wall in response to the tapping. The police then end up dismantling the wall, discovering the hidden corpse. The noise from the wall was the missing cat on top of his dead wife's head. It says, "upon its head, with an extended red mouth and solitary eye of fire sat the hideous beast."

In conclusion, "The Black Cat" has similarities to the stories "Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Imp of the Perverse."The narrators in Poe's stories commit crimes, yet they claim to say that they are sane. Each narrator says that they could not help but commit the crimes because they were overwhelmed by the spirit of perverseness. Each of the characters is affected by the spirit of perverseness, but towards the end of the stories, they each show that unconscious guilt is portrayed.