Madness is apparent in the unreasonable rationality the narrator uses to justify his murder. For his gold I had no desire” ( The Tell-Tale Heart ). In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator realizes that he lacks a motive for killing the old man he shares a house with. Madness is represented in both The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat through the narrators’ lack of sufficient reasoning for committing murder. This deconstruction of his short-stories will argue that Poe represents madness in The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat through the narrators’ lack of motivation to commit murder and the linguistic and structural elements of the texts. Poe has a unique way of showing this madness in these texts. Each of the narrators commits and successfully conceals murder, but ultimately gets caught because of their own insanity. Madness is a shared characteristic of the narrators in these texts. Similarly, in The Black Cat, the narrator attempts to kill his cat but murders his wife when she tries to defend the animal. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator murders the old man he lives with because he is bothered by the man’s eyes. It was the beating of the old mans heart. Manifested in his literary works, especially in his short stories “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” where the unsettling atmosphere sends chills down the readers’ spine. In his work, led by the Romantic interest in human mind, he was particularly intrigued by human psyche and its processes, exploring madness as a dark side of human psyche. Edgar Allan Poe can be considered as one of the most prominent and versatile authors of the Romantic period, having written a great number of short stories, intriguing poems as well as inventing the genre of modern detective fiction.

Edgar allan the tell tale heart