I need comparison and contrast of "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. Please if someone can help me.

-- Anonymous, October 09, 2003

Answers

Different points of view in narration. The murderer, somehwat self-centered even in his confession blaming the alcohol but enthralled with the rush of the experience thinks little of his wife victim. The same kind of self-centered killer in the Misfit but told from the thouside so we get an equal view of the grandmother especially, whose attempt to touch her killer sparks the final rage.

The remoteness of anything outside the murderer's self possessed horror seems the same in both stories, the O'Connor story being more about ordicary folk and Poe more mystically poetic. Yet the Misfit rambles quite a bit on the philosophic side too, setting aside victims, crime, religion whatever, in his joyless habit of violence.

Strangely the modern story is more repulsive. "The Wreck of the Hesperus" by Longfellow is more despairing and repulsive. In "The Black Cat" Poe mmakes the madness somehow more an intimate understanding that takes more time to judge harshly because we partly fall under the spell of his paranoid delusions, falling into the trap that maybe some greater supernatural force IS dominant there. And the scarcely sketched victim is not given to the reader for sympathy. O'Connor shows all sides of the horror and there is nothing at all magnetic or possessed about the Misfit, just a low emotion resentful void.

Apples and oranges portraits of murderers I suppose.

-- Anonymous, October 15, 2003