Unreliable Narrators in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe

The work of Edgar Allan Poe has fascinated readers for generations. Poe's work can be found not only in the majority of literature text books, but also in pop culture. Poe has become the poster child for American gothic literature. What is it about Poe's writing that has keep the interest of readers for years? It cannot be the genre, it went out years ago. It cannot be the content of the stories, for many of his stories follow the same motifs over and over again. What makes these stories stand the test of time are the narrators, as is illustrated in The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart.

In The Black Cat the narrator begins his confession by stating that he is not mad. But clearly the narrator has an extreme personality. In the beginning the narrator loved animals and later owned with his wife "birds, goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat." The narrator is also extreme in that he switches his hatred for the second cat quickly to his wife, who, up until the point where she tried to stop him from killing, had never vexed him. The narrator is also irrational. The narrator has no real reason to hate Pluto, but he takes out his eye when he scratches the narrator in fear. When explaining why he killed Pluto he says, "Because I knew that it had loved me." The narrator goes from hating Pluto because he had been hurt by him, and then because he was loved by him.

Two of the motifs present in this story are concealment and guilt. After burying an axe in his wife's head, the narrator automatically begins thinking of ways to dispose of his wife's remains. It never enters the mind of the narrator to go to the police and confess to the murder. Instead the narrator concludes that the best way to deal with his wife's body is to hide her in the wall. When the police come to investigate the narrator says that when the police searched thoroughly "the glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained." While the narrator is initially pleased with his handiwork, it would seem that the guilt was too much for him and exposes his wife's body, thus incriminating himself.

In the Tell-Tale Heart the narrator also claims that he was sane at the time of the murder. This narrator is also extreme in that he absolutely hates the old man's eye. The narrator even says, "it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye." By the description it sounds like the old man has a cataract, and not an Evil Eye. Whereas most people might consider it gross or ugly, the narrator allows himself to be so bothered by this eye that he feels the irrational need to kill the old man in order to rid himself of the eye.

The motifs of concealment and guilt are used again in this story. Unlike the narrator in The Black Cat, the narrator has thought long and hard about how to dispose of the body. It is again a source of pleasure how the narrator took "wise precautions...for concealment of the body." And also in this story the police come to investigate, only after a few hours and not four days. The narrator almost gets away with his crime, of which he is very proud. However, the guilt appears to get to him as he interprets the sound he hears, which is probably the sound of his own heart beat, as the beating heart of the old man. The narrator almost gets away with the murder, except that the guilt leads him to confess to his crime.

In both stories the narrator remains nameless and fairly ageless, which is often the case in Poe's writing. The narrator's tend to be unreliable, most are mentally unstable. Perhaps it is because we can never know whether or not what we are being told is the truth. There is often room for interpreting a Poe story many different ways. The appeal here is that there is no one right answer. It is often said that Poe was the first to write a detective story, which are still popular today. But whereas in detective stories today the reader wants to know "who done it," the reader of Poe's writing wants to know, "how much of this is true."