A gunshot stirred the sleeping cat, jerking him awake. His unpleasant dream, filled him with horror as he recalled the smell of burning firewood, boiling water, and the cruel laughter. His senses came back to him as he found himself hanging from a log, upside down, his legs tied together. Battered and bruised, the cat tried to remember why he was hanging on a piece of wood. As the cat’s memory came back slowly, he remembered himself fighting men, trying to escape their firm grip. One of the big men lifted his oversized fist and connected it to the cat’s hind legs. The feline shrieked in agony as the pain shot up towards his body, and he fell into an unknown darkness. He frowned as he tried to remember what had happened before the hunters came, but his mind was utterly blank. The cat blinked twice, finally taking in his surroundings. Two men came towards the cat and lifted him over to an open space. The cat looked below him and saw some wood. The men walked away, leaving the cat alone by himself. He closed his eyes; his throbbing legs were becoming numb and he started to feel a sense of dread, as he realized what would happen to him. The feline twitched as a stick prodded his bruised body. An old man stood over the cat, grinning from ear to ear. The cat shuddered at the sight; the man wore rags and looked as if he had never taken a bath in his life. His stench could be smelled from miles away, and it angered the hanging cat. All of a sudden, the ancient man untied the
The fate of the cat’s life is still unknown. At this point, the author points out that “[t]he kitchen light came on,
The essay titled “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin” by Robert Darnton discusses a massacre of cats that, according to the worker Nicolas Contat, took place in Paris in the first half of the 1700s. Contat’s writes about two apprentices, Jerome and Léveille. They had poor living conditions, were given food scraps to eat, and they had to deal with the master and their superiors. On top of all this, during the night stray cats would howl, keeping them awake. One day Léveille decided to crawl along the roof until he got near the master’s bedroom and began to howl with the cats. The aster and his wife became convinced that they were being bewitched and ordered the apprentices to get rid of the cats. They chased cats of rooftops, hit them with iron bars, and trapped them in sacks. They also performed mock trials where the rest of the workshop would join in and hang the cats with a noose. Although to us this seems like a horrific act of violence, the workers turned it into a celebration. These different views of the same event exist because of the different societies. The hatred these workers had for the bourgeois, popular celebrations, and the things that cats symbolized all contributed to the humor of the cat massacre. We must first understand these to be able to understand the cat massacre.
Afraid of his master, the cat slightly wounded the narrator on the hand with his teeth. Because of the cats reaction to his picking him up, the narrator pokes out one of the cat’s eye. The eye of the cat which is
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
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying
A bush rustles nearby as ferns dance in the evening winds. A green-eyed tomcat pads silently amongst the undergrowth. A small squeak accompanied by the quiver of delicate whiskers as a mouse perks up, alert. The feline bristles, leaping somewhat sloppily and just about ready to strike the mouse as it squeaks in terror and…..
Along with the majority of his tales, Poe’s “The Black Cat” is a grim plot that includes the downfall of its narrator in order to portray a human nature contrary to the archetypal transcendentalist version. The undoing of the chronicler is found in the unraveling of his mental state, which leads him to commit draconian actions on his cat, including cutting its eye out and then hanging it. Poe further emphasizes the narrator’s
Having moved into a new house, the narrator happens across a black cat, which then follows him home. Nerves rattled, the narrator does his best to avoid the cat. When that fails he tries to kill it, accidentally killing his wife in the process. After sealing his wife's body into the basement wall, he is interviewed by the police. Not unlike in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator of “The Black Cat” cracks under the pressure of his guilt and gives himself up. Symbolism and suspense make “The Black Cat” worth reading.
A couple of days later, the same cat is found with one eye cut out, just like Pluto, and many readers speculate that the cat was actually a resurrected Pluto. The missing eye can, however, be explained by the narrator’s erratic behavior while drunk. If he was capable of cutting out Pluto’s eye and forgetting about doing so by drowning himself in wine, nothing was stopping the narrator from doing the same to the new cat and merely forgetting about it due to alcohol. Moreover, another source of paranoia for the narrator was the new cat’s constant presence. The cat was always around the narrator and even slept by his side, though the narrator himself took this as a tactic of haunting that the cat was using in order to freak him out. The behavior can of course be explained reasonably by the fact that the cat was a cat and merely wanted to be around his owner. In addition, what caused the narrator to truly despise the cat was a gallows shaped white spot that became more and more evident the longer he was with the family. This can also be explained by the narrator’s alcohol problem and abusive behavior as cat hair grows back white when they are scarred. In his drunken state, the narrator could have been harming the cat and causing him to scar, perhaps even making the scars in the shape of a gallows to punish himself with the reminder of
He claims that he hung the cat because it loved him, and because it did not do anything to deserve the punishment. Because of this, the sin that he committed would jeopardize his soul forever. No sane man would do this to an animal that he claimed to love. Again the narrator is not in control of his body and is being controlled by the supernatural and shows signs of mental illness.
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
It is then that the cat hears the king and his daughter–the most beautiful princess in the land–are going to take a drive. The cat asks his sniveling master to bathe in a pond that is near the path the king and his daughter will drive past. The third son does as he is instructed–and let me assure you that the story takes great pains to point out that the son didn’t question the cat at all–and the cat hides his clothes. When the king drives past, the cat shouts
“The Black Cat” is one of Poe’s more gruesome stories. It is one of the darkest stories he has written. The narrator opens the story by saying he is sane. It is the night before he dies. The story talks about the narrator’s past and how he knew so many people who all
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 Cat In The Hat by Dr. Seuss, pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel, tells a story of two children at home on a rainy day alone, being visited by the Cat in the Hat and the turmoil that he causes. The Cat In The Hat is clearly Geisel’s most famous book, written in 1956 and published in 1957, considered a children’s classic today. It was The Cat In The Hat “where Dr. Seuss jubilantly breaks the barriers of the basal reader’s simplistic language and pedestrian artwork” (MacDonald 10). In The Cat In The Hat, Geisel uses this childish language and comical pictures as well as an interesting story and fun characters to not only create a successful children’s book but to deliver a subtle political message of rebellion against authority.