Edgar Allan Poe has often been considered the father of the psychological thriller. Two of his best examples are "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado." Both are excellent short stories that tell of murder, revenge, and madness. The narrators of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and the "The Cask of Amontillado" are trying to convince the reader of their sanity but have only become victims of the madness, which they had hoped to escape. By analyzing the differences and the similarities of "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," one can see that Poe uses a certain approach in creating these two works.

Poe has been the center of many critical studies; most trying to dissect his mind and get into the heart and meaning of his work, "Criticism now tends to ask, not whether Poe is a great writer, but why" (Buranelli 132). Poe's characters in both "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" confess of murder. Not only do they both commit murder, but they also escape external punishment and suffer endless internal turmoil. Therefore, "The punishment comes not from a church, a law, or even from society: it come

Another strange similarity between the stories is the burial placement. Both narrators bury their victims under their houses. This emphasizes their insanity; there are several reasons for this. One reason could be that they are keeping them as trophies. Another reason is that the homes symbolize the murders' minds and the basement represents their subconscious. Edward Davidson author of "Poe: A Critical Study" states " No one can understand or can interpret, in this moral region of Poe's lost souls, why he must be punished" (189). The stories endings and the narrator's punishment depends on how deep the narrator is able to put their victims under their houses and, therefore, how deep in their subconscious. Furthermore, " It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little more than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology" (Buranelli 21). Poe reaches inside all of us with all his works, makes us reexamine our selves and our own actions.

From the very beginning of the stories, you can see the similarities. The setting sets up the mood and in both "The Tell-Tale Heart" and The Cask of Amontillado" the setting is darkness. Poe uses this darkness in the setting as a blunt metaphor for the minds of both narrators. "The Tell-Tale Heart" covers a period of approximately eight days with most of the important action occurring each night around midnight. The location never changes from the elderly mans house. In "The Cask of Amontillado" the story begins around dusk, one evening during the carnival season in an unnamed European city. The location quickly changes from the lighthearted activities to the dark, damp catacombs under Montresor's house.

In both stories, the reader becomes quickly aware of the fact that both narrators are not reliable. The narrators feel that they performed the murders so calmly so there is no way they could be mad. In both stories the narrator is continually stressing to the reader that he is not mad, and tries to be convincing of the fact by how carefully these brutal crimes were planned and executed. The reader is invited into the inner workings of the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Montresor's sinister min

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Approximate Word count = 1560
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)