The narrator of the story, "The Black Cat," would not gouge out the cat's eye and then hang it from a tree as well as he would not kill his wife if he were sane. A derangement of the protagonist of "The Cask of Amontillado" causes him to exaggerate an insult and his irrational anger also leads to a needless murder. In, "The Tell-Tale Heart," it is the madness of the man which brings him to murder his employer and at the end of this particular story, the madness – or the acuteness of senses as it is frequently described by Poe – serves also as the man's punishment since the unbearable sound of the beating of his own guilty heart forced him to confess. The motif of madness is also used as a means of ravage of the mind which could result in death as it is portrayed in, "The Fall of the House of Usher.".
Edgar Allan Poe became famous also for his developing of the Gothic literary tradition. "The early nineteenth century was beguiled by things Gothic – quaint folklore, macabre legends, preternatural events, medieval history, forgotten tombs, ruined abbeys. Around these interests grew a whole body of literature [That] provided Poe with a literary milieu perfectly adapted to his taste and talent."3 Besides frightening subjects like death, disease, dark setting, haunted locations and others, characters who exhibit madness4 are the gothic elements incorporated in number of his stories, like for example in, "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Berenice," and, "The Cask of Amontillado." But in order not to just echo the Gothic writers before him Poe added something new to his borrowings and transformed the Gothic tale into something alive and lasting. He gave it an urgency derived from his personal life5. .
That brings up the question about biography-oriented reasons for Poe's abundant use of the motif of madness in short fiction.
