Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe's

The Tell Tale Heart vs. William Wilson

Paige Eiseman

Mrs. Morgan

English 11, Period 5

April 17, 2007

Edgar Poe was born on 19 January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of actors Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (1787-1811) and David Poe (1784-1810). (Edgar Allan Poe)He had a brother named William Henry (1807-1831) and a sister Rosalie (1811-1874).( Edgar Allan Poe) After the death of his parents Edgar was taken in by Frances (d.1829) and John Allan (d.1834), a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Virginia.( Edgar Allan Poe) On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore delirious and "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance," according to the friend who found him, Dr. E. Snodgrass. (Edgar Allan Poe)He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died early on the morning of October 7. (Edgar Allan Poe)Poe started out assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839.( Edgar Allan Poe) He then moved on to bigger and better things in his career. Edgar Allan Poe is a very interesting author. Poe is known for his amazing, yet creepy works. If you were to read a random short story by Poe would see that there are many similarities. Most of his characters and settings all are relevantly the same along with the subject matter. In The Tell Tale Heart and William Wilson, they are both very mysterious. They are also both about murder and how the narrator can not hold back his feelings back.

In the short story William Wilson, Poe anticipates the major theories of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the twentieth century's most important psychologists. (William Wilson Analysis)Like Freud, Poe uses an alter ego in this story. (William Wilson Analysis) William Wilson doubles in love and hate. As much as the narrator resists, he cannot help feeling the affection for his rival. The imaginary double shows the man that he cannot get away from his insanity. In the end he finally kills himself, because of the delusion that the imaginary double is actually real, and following him around.

In the Tell Tale Heart there is another deranged unnamed person who tries to convince the readers that he is sane. This character's gender is never identified, but you can tell Poe was intending that the character was a male. (Tell Tale Heart) If the narrator was a female, in the part of the story where he brings the chairs in for the policemen, the policemen would have been the ones getting the chairs. The themes in this story would be a crazy person with an alter ego that makes him do crazy things, the fear of discovery, and evil within is worse then evil without.(Tell Tale Heart) In this story the narrator fixates on the "evil eye" of the old man. This is one of the symbols in this story. (Poe's Short Stories)Throughout the story the narrator says that he is sane a quite a few times. The main idea of this story was to separate the man