There are many similarities between Rabindranath Tagore and Edgar Allen Poe in the sense that their motifs in writing have a certain message to them. The short story of Edgar Allen Poe that has the most similarities to “Punishment” by Tagore would have to be “The Black Cat”. Throughout both of these short stories we see there being a recurring theme of deceit and abuse. In Tagore we see a group of people starting to stretch a lie to the point where at one point the truth becomes a possible cover-up story. In “The Black Cat” we see a man being abusive towards his family; to the point where he commits murder and then goes on to lie to cover that murder up.
In Tagore’s story there are two brothers who live together with their wives while working and one of the brothers named Dukhiram kills his wife in a form of domestic violence based rage. Everyone around him that witnessed the murder then goes on to start a web of lies in order to cover this murder up. In ‘The Black Cat”there is a man who drinks alcohol very often. He first in a drunken state abuses a black cat which he and his wife adore and then later on in another drunken state mixed with the guilt and kills his wife and hides her in the walls of their home. He hides this secret and lies which becomes suspicious and the police eventually investigate and along with the narrators guilt the wife’s body is found and the narrator confesses his crime. In Tagore’s writing we seethe lies which Chidam tells his wife to say causes distrust and completely ruins any bit of consistency he still had with his wife in their relationship.
These two pieces of work are both very similar because together they show that one abuse leads to a chain reaction that leads to lies. Tagore tries to ring some things like the social issue of lying to the surface as well as addressing a huge issue of domestic violence. In Poe’s writing we see these problems being highlighted in a form that shows us some of the horrors that these events could cause and in a sense provide us with an example or reason to stay away from those actions.
