soul and tacitly approve of the things he does. 

The truth is that Montresor commits a horrible murder (walling Fortunato into a wall of an underground crypt) just because Fortunato somehow insulted him. The slights and insults could not have been significant, for Fortunato still speaks to and acts without malice toward Montresor. This narrator suffers form some form of mental illness or insanity. 

In "The Black Cat," the narrator is writing his story to readers the night before he is going to die. Over and over again in his opening paragraph, the narrator expresses his belief that what happened to him (not what he did) was nothing more than a series of common and unremarkable event. He calls this a "homely narrative" about a "series of mere household events," "an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects." The horrible things he does, including abusing animals and his wife before finally killing both, are not ordinary events which might have happened to anyone. Contrary to his insane belief, we do not approve.

Finally, the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" also downplays his own madness as he reveals his actions to his readers. He admits he is nervous. It is true that his senses have been sharpened. He hears things "in the heaven and the earth," but of course that does not qualify as madness. And, of course, if he is calm he cannot be crazy, right?

True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The horrendous and senseless murder of an old man is certainly madness, but the narrator would not say it is so.

All three Poe narrators falsely assume that their readers will agree with them. All three of these Poe narrators are convinced that they are perfectly same because the things they do seem quite normal and natural to them. In fact, it is their view of horrible, murderous acts as normal which proves they are insane. They try to insinuate themselves with 

Edgar Allan Poe's central dictum of the short story is that it must contain a singleness derived from pattern and design throughout the harrative, an arabesque, as it is termed, that follows what one critic calls "the principle of redundancy and repetition." Moreover, since the narrators of many of his stories are obsessed, what obsesses them is, then, repeated and patterned throughout the narrative.

Indeed, it is this pattern which gives significance and unity to the separate elements of the story. No cause and effect narratives are Poe's works; instead, Poe maintains that the reader must become aware of the "end" of the story and its main intent early on in order to grasp the overall purpose and understand that the "seemingly trivial elements" actually have significant meaning in this total pattern. 

• "The Tell-Tale Heart"

In this story, the motif of the eye generates the focus of the narrator's obsessionthat drives the narrative to its single effect. The narrator identifies with the old man, yet proclaims that he hates his "Evil Eye." Obsessed with this vulture-like eye, the narrator repeats observations about the eye as he peeks at it for seven nights. But, in his identification with the old man, the narrator is unwittingly sympathetic to the man's listening to the death watches.

Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased....The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! ... I have told you that I am nervous; so I am....amid the dreadful silence...so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.

In his efforts to escape "the curse of time and mortality" symbolized by the "hellish tattoo" of the heart and the morbidity of the"vulture eye," the narrator kills the "eye" as he would like to halt the torture of his own "I." Later, however, what the murderer perceives as the ticking of the old man's heart is, in fact, the ticking of his own heart in his identification with him as a mortal cursed--the principle of "redundancy and repetition."

• "The Raven"

With his poem, Poe expressed a wish to create an effect of beauty with melancholy; he felt that the word "Nevermore," repeated with differing circumstances and impact, lent a melancholic echo to the narrator's sorrow. This "redundancy and repetition" evokes the theme of what Poe perceived as the universal need in humans for self-torture:

On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.
Then the bird said "Nevermore."

• "The Cask of Amontillado"

The use of arabesquein this story is proliferate as every single detail contributes to the final ironic effect of the narrative. Continually, Montresor ironically admonishes Fortunato not to continue into the catacombs because the niter will harm him. But, the greatest irony is that Fortunato avenges himself on Montresor, and Motresor has not gotten away with impunity and Montresor has not gotten away with impunity because in telling his story fifty years later, he exhibits his guilt and must be making a confession that cannot be forgiven as it is insincere:

My heart grew sick--on account of the dampness of the catacombs.