Similarities Between The Tell Tale Heart And The Cast Of Amontillado
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Edgar Allen Poe, a brilliant yet chilling poet weaves similar yet strikingly different tales in two of his many short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”. There is no question, he focuses on truly eerie subjects which have left a mark on the horror and detective fictional world. Through his stories, Poe uses recurring motifs, homogenous diction, and use of heightened tone to establish the similarity and differences between his works. Many similar motifs occur in each of Poe’s stories. It is no surprise that this would occur since both of them contain themes of darkness, horror, fear, despair, and other haunting themes. For example, Poe takes different motifs from each story and redraws them several times to create a point. In “The Cast of Amontillado”, the main character Montresor constantly stresses the dampness in the cellar as detrimental to Fortunato’s health and nags at him to turn back having no intention to ever do so. Likewise, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the unnamed narrator tells the reader over and over, “I loved the…show more content… Both settings in the stories are very dark and eerie although “The Cast of Amontillado’s” is much more developed as a whole. The catacombs emphasize Poe’s intent of showing isolation and fear. Poe also uses an unreliable narrator in both his stories. Both of his narrators show signs of going slightly mad which leads the reader to believing that the narrator is unreliable in what he reveals and says. Both the unnamed man and Montesor show themselves to be dark and disturbed individuals who do not know the extent of their own evilness and are pleased by their antagonists awful passing. Finally, he employs the use of the underground to symbolize his darkness in both of the stories. Montresor leads Fortunado down into the catacombs while the unnamed narrator hides the dead body of the old man in the depths of the floorboards symbolizing where true evil