Alcoholism In The Black Cat By Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allan Poe struggled with drug addiction, and through his experience, he has been able to present his struggles in complicated narratives carefully. Alcohol plays a central role in Edgar Allen Poe stories including The Masque of the Red Death, Hop-Frog, and The Cask of Amontillado. The unique writing styles presented in these stories develop from Poe's notorious alcoholism combined with his dysfunctional and usually unsupportive family. Even at childhood, alcohol was prevalent in the family and was given the role of waiter during family parties where he refilled other guest wine glasses. When he became an adult, Poe would go on week-long sprees and became so addicted to the point that a little amount of alcohol would incapacitate him.

Romanticism is an intellectual, spiritual, and literary movement that begins at the start of the nineteenth century and concludes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of the many characteristics that are associated with Romanticism, the characteristics that are most evident in literature from this period are the characteristics of individuality and imagination. The author Edgar Allen Poe exhibits these characteristics in his works “The Black Cat”, and the “The Raven”.

What is alcoholism and how does it severely affect people? It is a chronic condition characterized by uncontrolled drinking and preoccupation with alcohol. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette’s father Rex, is an alcoholic. We assume he enjoys drinking when on page nine, Jeannette recalls her father smelling of whiskey. “As he held me close, I breathed in his familiar smell of Vitalis, whiskey, and cigarette smoke. It reminded me of home.” While it is concerning that young Jeannette knows what whiskey smells like, it is not concerning enough until page fourteen, paragraph six. “In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation. There was what Mom

Even though Poe was completely addicted to alcohol, many times, he tried very hard to fight against his alcoholism. Right after his first long drinking experience, during college, he tried to stay away from it (Black, Jamee A. 3). His drinking times were intermittent and he stayed abstain from alcohol for months in some of those periods (Poe, Drugs and Alcohol 8). Promises were made and repeatedly times he said that would never drink again. As one side of Poe tells him that he should stop with alcohol, the other side tells that he should drink to relief his emotional pains and usually he followed this last side once is a lot easier to deal with it (Black, Jamee A. 6). In 1847, Poe’s get extremely hard into drinking, one of the worse times during his whole life, after the death of his young wife Virginia (Hennelly, Mark M. 1). After this event he could stop drinking alcohol anymore (Poe, Drugs and Alcohol 14).

One of the reasons that the narrator is responsible for his own actions is because he is an alcoholic. Because he relies so heavily on alcohol to make it through the day, he is not of sound mind and therefore his judgment is off. This can

In today’s society, alcohol has become one of the main necessities for people to create relaxation, confidence, and the ability to be social. In the short story “A Bartender Tells What Man Did to Booze, and Booze to Man”, an anonymous bartender gives an up close and personal account of his observations about the effects alcohol has on men. He emphasizes the change in their character after a few drinks. Koren Zailckas from Smashed shares a memoir of her life describing her relationship with alcohol abuse and the problems that it caused for her. Although certain types of alcohol are used to support good health, it is the excessive consumption and misuse that leaves people dependent resulting in significant social, physical, and mental

¨In the morning he would wake up groaning like the demon in a Kabuki drama; he would vomit and then start sipping again. He terrified us all, lurching around the tiny room, cursing in Japanese and swinging his bottles wildly,¨ (Houston 50-51). This is a quote from the book Farewell to Manzanar. In this point of the book Jeanne’s father was an alcoholic. He would drink himself to sleep every night and just wake up and do it again. As a child it is hard to go through this because you can never really understand why a father would do this. Especially when he has a loving family that is there for him during it all. It’s hard to comprehend why someone would put themselves through that physical state knowing that it was hurting the ones they love.

But then again it can be another misinterpretation. For example, I have gone to other family’s party’s and when I see alcohol being served I already know who will start a fight later on that night. I have also watch scenes in TV where the father is an alcoholic and beats their kids. I always have the feeling that violence will occur when alcohol is around because some people do not know how to control their liquor. For some reason when humans are sober they tend to be shy or reserved but when they drink alcohol they show more communication or happiness. This example is a positive outcome but there are those individuals who alcohol makes them feel anger too. But then again the saying of alcohol is the cause of violence is another misinterpretation too. The first time I read the story I though the son was being beaten badly by his drunk father that even the kitchen pans fell off the shelf. “You beat time on my head with a palm cake hard by dirt” (Roethke). This stanza also confused me the first time I read it because I believed the boy was being hit by his father on his head on a negative way. However, I do think now the father was using the sons head as a drum to make noise to dance the

Drinking can cause a person to have a complete personality change and become violent or hostile after drinking. They may also become irritable or panicky during times when a drink is expected. An alcoholic may drink to the point of black out; this is where they don’t remember what they’ve done or said that happened during a bout of drinking. A definite red flag for alcoholism is when a person has to have to drink in the morning when they first wake up.

Alcoholism is a primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations. The disease is often progressive and fatal. Alcoholism is a complex disease with physical, social and psychological consequences, but it can be treated through detoxification and anti-anxiety drugs. What will be explained in this essay is basically the history of alcohol, signs of one possibly being an alcoholic, possibilities to why one becomes an alcoholic, and treatments for it.

Mystery has surrounded Edgar Allan Poe’s death for many years, without anyone really knowing the main cause. Edgar Allan Poe, famous author of ‘The Raven’, died in 1849. Three main points have been the ideas of his death, the alcohol theory, the disease theory, and the cooping theory. The alcohol theory proves the main cause of Edgar Allan Poe’s death.

Substance abuse plays a role in more than one of Poe's works. In the black cat alcohol drives the narrator to rip out his cats eye with with a pen and then hang the cat in guilt of what he had done. The narrator was a kind hearted man who loved animals and would do nothing to hurt them until he started to drink. He became an angrier person, always getting enraged with the people and creatures around him and his personality changed for the worse. Substance abuse changed him and drove him to be a different person than he really was. After killing the cat he felt little to no remorse for the deed he had committed and went back to his drinking and partying.Eventually his drinking led him to kill his wife, substance abuse changed him into a

When Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Black Cat” in 1843, the word “paranoia” was not in existence. The mental illness of paranoia was not given its name until the twentieth century. What the narrator is suffering from would be called paranoia today. The definition of paranoia is psychosis marked by delusions and irrational decisions. This definition could best be described in the nineteenth century as being superstitious and believing that supernatural powers are affecting our decisions. Superstition and being taken over by the supernatural is a recurring metaphor for paranoia in Poe’s story.

Edgar Allan Poe uses a great deal of symbolism in his story. He often uses symbolism to illustrate his views of nature. One example of Poe using symbolism in this short story is when he talks about how every time he see’s the black cat, he feels angry and paranoid. A black cat naturally symbolizes evil and for Poe to say that when he see’s a black cat, he feels anger, this gives the reader an ideal that the black cat in Poe’s short story, also symbolizes evil. Poe uses symbolism to impact the overall tone of the story by using symbolism and imagery throughout his story.

The title of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” leads the reader to believe the short story is about one black cat. However, almost in the middle of the story, a second cat emerges. Since the title suggest there is only one cat, and the narrator hints the second cat is one of the first cat’s nine lives, comparison of the cats become necessary to see if they are one and the same. For example, both cats desire to be around the narrator and both are missing an eye, but each cat has a major difference in the color of their fur.