This is about the three short stories "The Black Cat" and "The Tell Tale Heart" written by Edgar Allen Poe and "Call It Madness" is written by Guy Du Maupassant"The black cat" is written by Edgar Allan Poe and is about a man who is paranoid about his cat. After turning to alcohol he becomes very violent and starts to abuse his animals and his wife.The man became more and more violent and took his rage out on the cat. He was a bully. He killed the cat eventually, only to be found by another cat. After a while he kills his wife in one of his spells of rage. He gets a perverse kick from violence. However, his conscience gets the better of him and when the police come calling to investigate ...view middle of the document...
Each story has a similar plot. The plot of "The black cat" is hinted at the start when the man starts to describe where he his. He starts by looking back on his life and tells us that he is about to loose his life as he is going to be hung. He does not tell us what he is being hung for, which makes you wonder. It must have been something bad to be hung for it. He also keeps telling us that he is not mad, which shows that someone thinks he is. "Yet, mad am I not". He continues to tell us that he is about to be hung and that he wants to unburden his soul "but tomorrow I die, and today I unburden my soul". He calls his problems a series of household events, but yet he is being hung for them. From then the man starts to chart his decent into madness by looking back on his life from a prison cell.He tells us about his childhood and how he was a sweet, tender child, but also bullied and laughed at by the other kids. "My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my friends". Because of this and having no human companions, he grew a peculiar relationship with animals. "I was especially fond of animals". This was the start of his decent into madness. He grew up with his pets until early in his manhood when he married, a woman who could only be described as his soul mate. His marriage was really the only time in his life that he was happy, and had filled his ambitions in life. This was until he turned to alcohol which turned him into a different person. "Fiend intemperance had experienced a radical alteration for the worse". To start of he took his anger out on his wife by using intemperate language "I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife". As he became more addicted and his alcohol consumption levels rose, so did his anger. One night when he came home from the pub, he became paranoid with the cat. This shows his madness was increasing. He became so paranoid with the cat that he grabbed the cat and cut its eye out with a pocket knife. He described himself to be instantly possessed by a demon. "And more than a fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my body". This tells us that he got a perverse kick out of violence. After letting the cat recover he hung it from a tree in the garden. "I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to a limb of the tree". His madness kept growing with every drink. When at the pub he acquires another cat similar to his old one which he despised. This shows he is mad. After spending several days with the cat, building up tension and anger with it, he tries to kill it. In his rage he picks up an axe but his wife stops him. He swings the axe not thinking what he is doing, and embeds the axe into her head, killing her. This is when his insanity reached a maximum. He buried her body in the wall and felt no guilt for what he had done. From being a shy, timid human he became a violent killer.In similarity to "The black cat" "The tell tale heart" also starts off with ...
