Paranoia, Panic & Punishment

Paper Summary:

This paper compares and contrasts these two stories which each involve an element of fundamental fear that is, in essence, the fear of fear itself, for in each tale it is an unfounded, irrational fear of what is unknown or greatly misunderstood. In both "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Big Black Good Man", this fear blossoms into paralleling points of obsessive paranoia and panic that end in similar situations of self-punishment brought on by individual perceptions of guilt and responsibility.

From the Paper:

Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, published in 1843, tells the tale of a man obsessed with the idea that his housemate's optical cataracts are the incarnation of the dreaded ancient curse of the "evil eye", for, as he states, "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold" (Poe 277). This theme of obsession is echoed in Richard Wright's 1958 story Big Black Good Man, a tale in which a Danish hotel porter becomes convinced that a very large and very dark black sailor, a patron of the hotel, plans to kill him. This porter, known as Olaf, forms this assumption solely from his fear of the dark American soldier, whom he views as "too big, too black, too loud, and probably too violent" (Wright 96).

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