However, all of a sudden, his conscience haunts him and he is made to confess the truth by the inner self. His faith in his ability to hide the murder is so strong that nothing seemed to bother him. When the police arrive the narrator takes them to the place where he committed the crime. With the plan hatched, he executes the murder and makes sure the old man is stone dead, and then conceals his body leaving no evidence of the crime at the scene. The narrator is not in a position to explain how the idea to kill the old man came to his mind but it started haunting him once it is conceived. He blames it on the old man’s ‘pale blue eye with a film over it’ being the reason for the murder but how much of it could be true depends on the sanity of the narrator. In the story ‘Tell-tale heart’ the protagonist kills an old man not because the old man did anything wrong to him or he did not like the person but the idea to kill comes to him naturally. He “presents the compelling drama of two men, one who will stop at nothing to get the revenge that he deems himself and his family worthy of, and another whose pride will ultimately be the catalyst for his death.” In this analysis, we find the best study on the symbols, irony, and theme of the two masterly short stories. In his best-known Tales of horror, “The Cask of Amontillado,” (1846) Poe suggests that pride can be a very dangerous thing. It is simultaneously a horror story and psychological thriller told from a first-person perspective.

One of Poe’s most famous short stories, ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’’ (1843) can be best understood as a psychological portrait of a mad narrator who kills a man and afterward hears his victim’s relentless heartbeat. In this discourse two of his famous short stories, ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’ and “The Cask of Amontillado” are studied in an attempt to better understand the use of symbolism, the literary tool of irony, and the theme of terror as a Gothic element in the stories. This had a great influence on his writings and evidence of such fits can be traced in his short stories and poems. His whole life is noted for the fits of madness and depression which made him attempt suicide in 1848. In American literary history, one greatest but unhappiest names is that of Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), who is a master of Gothic stories and a celebrated poet of natural human instincts.

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