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Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Hitchcock have insane characters in their stories. Some examples are Edgar Allen Poe’s William Wilson in “William Wilson,” and the narrator of the “Tell-Tale Heart”; and Alfred Hitchcock’s Bruno in Strangers on a Train. These characters have similar foundations for their unstable sanity; however, each character had his own peculiar motives which led to this unsound state-of-mind. William Wilson appears what society deems “normal” in the beginning of …

…as being mad because he thought that no madman could be as skillful as he. Bruno also functioned normally in society, but he could not manage his hatred for his father properly, and this led him to believe that murder was tolerable because he would not be caught. All three characters possess the likeness of being able to appear “normal,” but eventually for their different motives, their mind collapsed for lack of ration and reason.