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Poe’s works could be interpreted as the critique of totality in human psychology. The narrator in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” appears as a patient who is morbidly sensitive and suffering from the attacks of hysteria, as his maladies can be associated with such psychopathic phenomena as fear, nervousness (nervous disorder), and obsession. Understanding that there is no simple way of approaching the human subject, Poe may be critical of the master narrative that the human psyche is something autonomous. Poe then subverts the classic paradigm of the one and the other, as readers see the collapse of reason in his de-enlightened narratives. No matter how vulnerable the other may look, the narrator eventually becomes preoccupied with the disturbing force of the other's eye, killing the other to get out of the suffocating situation. The murder moves his psyche into the next phase of fragmentation, the state of possession, which is an indication of the complex indeterminacy of the human soul. The texts promote Poe’s way of theorizing fragmentation as the symptoms of possession, as this splintering of the psyche is normally seen to imply that the soul of the subject (the one) is possessed by the spirits of another person (the other).
