Poe's Psychos

No survey of psychos in fiction would be complete with a glimpse into the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He is also one of my personal favorite authors that inspired me as a child to start writing. Some of his most renowned stories feature an unreliable narrator that has all the trademarks of a psychopath. The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Cask of Amontillado are prime examples of Poe’s work with psychopaths.

The Tell-Tale Heart was the first story I ever read that made me fall in love with unreliable narrators. By today’s standards, many people might find it slow and the language a bit to antiquated to keep up with the high tension fiction on the market. However, it’s hard to ignore how masterful Poe is in creating the first person narrator as someone the reader instantly mistrusts. This mistrust pulls the reader through the story. That’s not to say the reader feels the narrator is lying to them. Rather, there is a keen awareness that the narrator believes he is sane when his version of what happen blatantly disproves that. Readers know it is impossible he actually heard the heart beating under the floorboards, yet the narrator states it as a fact.

The Black Cat has a narrator with a similar feel. We trust his sanity a touch more, at first at least. A decent man turned sour by alcoholism, this narrator tells his story in a manner to imply a supernatural cause to his downfall. Still, at several points, his irrationality at the cruel and violent outbursts strikes the reader as something crazier. Furthermore, his casualness at killing his wife, who he states was a good woman, makes the reader question how honest he has been about his good nature at the beginning of the story.

In The Cask of Amontillado, the narrator has thought out his murderous plan well with a clear motive. His target has insulted him in the past. What makes this narrator a psycho is the way he is enacting his revenge. Rather than address the insult directly or cut Fortunato out of his life, the narrator chooses to pretend to be fake friends with the man for an extended period so he can lure him to a cruel death. Someone has to exceedingly unfeeling and at least a bit insane to take an insult to that extreme of revenge.

Reading these stories together, it’s impossible to ignore the repeated themes and plot points Poe used. The first two stories had an eye as a significant part of the psychos focus, one driving him to kill the other plucked out as an unprovoked act of violence. In the last two stories the victim was bricked up in a wall, one alive and one deceased. Has anyone checked Poe’s walls for corpses? In all three shorts, the narrator was nice to the victim and held a rather uncaring view of that person up until their death. In all three the killer was overconfident that they wouldn’t be caught. It begs the question if Poe himself was a bit psychotic and these stories were his not-so-hidden desires.

Overall, these stories are classic. They are older, so the language can be slightly off-putting, but still well worth a read. They are short enough for one to read while waiting at the doctor’s office, yet memorable enough that they remain in the popular conscious today. Definitely read or re-read them.