In many texts, Edgar Allen Poe has shown that he is afraid of those who are mentally insane but sincerely believe that they are rational, reasonable people. As you read the short stories “Berenice” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” you can see her fears manifest in somewhat irrational ways. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe writes about a man who becomes obsessed with a man's eye. The old man is blind and so there is a blue haze over his eyes. The narrator decides that he must kill the man to free himself from him, so he sneaks into his room every night for a week. One day the old man wakes up and the narrator pounces on him and suffocates him. As soon as he hears her heart stop beating, he removes the mattress with which he was suffocating her. Once he sees that the man is dead, he cuts up his body and puts it under the ground. One of the neighbors called the police because he heard screaming. So when the police arrived, the narrator convinced them that everything was fine. As they talked, the storyteller felt a sense of guilt and confessed everything, showing them where he had buried the body. The storyteller was a normal man who could not be classified as mentally unfit. He was a mentally sane man, obsessed with something out of the ordinary. He was so obsessed that he became mentally ill without knowing it. He thought it was rational to sneak into this man's room for eight days. He realized after he murdered the man and the police told him that it didn't make sense for him to murder the man because his eyes were obscured. Once the man realized what he had done, he became riddled with fear and guilt. In this text you can see Poe's fears towards those who do not know what they are capable of until it happens. In the short story “Berenice,” Poe talks about a man named Agaeus, who is in love with his cousin Berenice. Both suffer from disorders. She suffers from a form of epilepsy; every time she has an episode she loses consciousness and looks like she's dead. Agaeus suffers from an obsessive disorder. Berenice gets sick and the only thing that hasn't been affected is her teeth, so one day she comes in to talk to Agaeus and smiles and he becomes obsessed with her teeth. He focuses so much on this that he eventually passes out and doesn't remember anything that happened in the time that passed. At that point, Bérénice has an episode and everyone thinks she's dead, so they bury her. The next thing Agée remembers is that her servant came running and shouted that someone had desecrated Berenice's grave. They look and see the shovel and muddy clothes and he becomes so distraught when he sees a container next to him. He tries to grab it to see what's inside, but he drops it and his teeth scatter on the floor. Agaeus seems to be mentally together, but he becomes so focused on certain things in his life that days pass without him realizing it. Days had passed while he was so focused on Berenice's teeth, and he hadn't realized it until his servant had pulled him out. Once he got out, he realized he had done something horrible. In his "waking dream", he had dug Berenice's grave, where she was buried alive, and had pulled the teeth out of her head. We know she was still alive because he was covered in claw marks when she tried to stop him. Poe speaks indirectly about the..