Alcoholic Obsession In The Black Cat

Concerning “The Black Cat”, Poe vividly portrays individuality as a connecting theme to Romanticism because of the narrator’s treatment of each character of the story’s characters, his wife and the cat. In the story, the narrator kills his wife in a “more than demonical” rage, for no other reason than to express his rage at his wife’s interference between him and the cat (723). He acted alone, with no prompting from anyone other than himself. The cat as a character receives no different of treatment from the narrator’s wife: even the wife’s own intervention on the cat’s behalf does not save it from its eventual demise, rather the narrator “firmly resolved to put into death”(723). The only way the cat escapes death is through hinting at the narrator’s murder to the police through the house’s walls.

	The second black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s guilt. The night after the narrator’s house caught on fire, he went to a bar where he saw black cat two. Black cat two resembled black cat one in every aspect except one. The finding of black cat two is symbolic of the night in which the narrator had came home from a bar toxicated. When the narrator began to leave the bar, black cat two began to follow him and this is symbolic of the guilt that follows the narrator. The narrator noticed that black cat two resembled

The narrator in “The Black Cat” is unreliable because he is an alcoholic. According to the text in the beginning of the story the

To conclude this argument it is very clear that the actions that took place in, “The black cat,” are the narrators fault. It is on account of him being an alcoholic, being in a poor mental state, and being abusive to his wife and pets that the fault lies in the

The storyteller begins the story by stating from an early age he has had an obsession with animals. Poe states, “This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure.” (Poe) This statement is evidence of the insanity the narrator experienced at a very young age. He goes on to explain that he and his wife have many domesticated animals, including Pluto, a large beautiful black cat. He describes the mutual fondness between him and the cat. This relationship between him and the cat, is strange. For years they have a growing friendship, until he started drinking alcohol in excess. The narrator goes on to explain how one night after getting completely intoxicated, the cat panicked and bit him. This causes the author to become angry and in a psychotic fit of rage, he takes a knife and cuts out one of the cat’s eyes. After this encounter, the cat fears him, and tries to avoid him at all cost. In the beginning, the storyteller is regretful and feels remorseful for the cruelty. But soon we see the narrator’s insanity expressed when Poe states, “But this feeling soon gave place

“The Black Cat” is an old short story written by Edgar Allan Poe an American Writer. It is a horror fiction story which demonstrate the fascinating changes that the human mind has during the abuse of alcohol. The protagonist is physiological corrupter by the abuse of alcohol and his mind play games with itself. He changes his personality as the story progresses and the way that he treats others around him. Everyone is affected by his behavior even his lovely cat. The cat becomes the object of his hate and in some way it is the first thing that he blames about his irrational acts. In the short story “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allan Poe, uses a varied forms of Irony, dramatic Irony, verbal Irony, and situation irony to produce a transformation of love threw hate along of the story.

Edgar Allan Poe, the acclaimed poet, has created a multitude of short stories, one being “The Black Cat”.The short story depicts an alcoholic on his slow descent into insanity; this relates heavily to the author’s own life, being an extreme alcoholic himself. The narrator of “The Black Cat” is not only driven mad by alcohol, but also by a black cat, as you might guess from the title of the story. At the beginning of “The Black Cat”, you can tell the narrator’s alcohol addiction is taking its toll when he starts abusing his wife and pets. His actions slowly led up to him killing his cat, Pluto, and then killing his own wife because tried to defend their second cat from him. His meticulous writing style, diction, syntax, and imagery in his short stories are used to portray his emotions.

The “beating of the old man's heart” then leads him to confess to the cops. Similarly, The Black Cat is about a man who becomes an alcoholic and he continues to drink a lot which leads him to kill his wife and his cat. The theme in both stories is that of good versus evil. Evil lurks in the hearts of all, and sometimes people act upon it. The author develops this theme by using first person narration and symbolism.

In “The Black Cat,” the man was married to a patient and caring woman. They acquired another cat that, according to the man, looked remarkably like Pluto (709). One day, the cat almost tripped the man while they were walking down a flight of stairs. This “exasperated” the man “to madness” (Poe 709). He lifted an axe and “aimed a blow at the animal,” (Poe 709).

The fact is that the way the narrator starts off the story, by describing himself in an overly immaculate way, leads one to the assumption that he is unreliable. However, if he was not as pure of heart from his youth as he insists then the explanation must be that the potential to be evil was contained within the narrator from the day he was born. Indeed, what Edgar Allen Poe was trying to illustrate in the “Black Cat” is that the potential to get to a point where conscience doesn't exist lies within each and every one of us.

In the beginning, the narrator gave a confession in retrospect; he was an honorable man born as a sane, kind, loving. Additionally, he had a great love for animals. He married a girl at a young age. Their house was like a mini zoo; birds, gold fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat. The man singles out a huge, beautiful all-black cat as his favorite, named Pluto. Because of its unusual intelligence, the wife jokes around that the cat might be a witch in disguise. Over the course of time, the narrator and Pluto created a strong bond between them.

The narrator of “The Black Cat” is unreliable because of his alcoholism and state of mind. In his early life, he might have been dependable. However, as the story proceeds, it becomes establishable how unrealistic his story is. Alcoholism affected the narrator's actions and it might have even altered his memory. Being an alcoholic changed the narrator to the worse.

The greatest metaphor throughout this tale is the black cat. While the narrator’s wife has been known to refer to the dark-haired feline as a “witch in disguise”, the metaphor for Poe is that the cat is not only a superstitious monster but it is also a metaphor for being the narrator’s own personal demon (Poe 706). The recurring events with the black cats in the story portray that they are metaphors for the narrator’s own problems that haunt him. As the series of events continue throughout the story, the cat becomes a visual element in the scene for the narrator’s recurring violence and finally brings him to the point of his insanity.

For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him”. He abused all the other animals and even his wife but he never hurt Pluto. The first black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s evil heart. It shows favouritism and obsession with black cats from the start this story, later after he had murdered Pluto, he still went out and realised when he saw the second cat that it is what he was looking for. “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.”. The second black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s guilt. This fact about the cat made him hate more simply because he felt guilty of what he had done to Pluto. His guilt and religious torment gives us an insight to his insanity.

At the beginning of the story, the man was essentially “happy” with his wife and black cat, Pluto. The story is light until the man begins drinking. He has begun to like that the cat did not want to be around him and avoided his presence anymore. This is possibly due to the fact that he is not happy with his drinking. However, one night when he came home and frightened the cat, which