Edgar Allan Poe 's 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 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

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

He consistently wrote poems about extreme intoxication and depression. It is very common for someone to be so down that they purposely drink themselves to death. “The Black Cat” by EAP is a short story by Poe that was made four years before he passed away. The years close to Poe’s death he started to get back to his alcoholism and depression stage in his life. Poe’s real life actions showed up quite a bit in his works including this one. In this short story Poe describes a man and wife who own a cat by the name of Pluto. This character Poe made I believe is him so the actions that happened next shows his insane alcoholism at it’s worst. One night this man comes home from his night on the town extremely intoxicated. As he walked in he reached for the cat and Pluto bit a slight wound on his hand. “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer”, showing he had no control over his actions. We can’t automatically turn to euphemisms when dealing with death. Poe was an amazing poet, yet the best of us still fall into a state that we can’t bring ourselves out of.The hardship he went through was a great inspiration for how Poe wrote great literature. In “To My Mother”,”Annabel Lee”, and “The Black Cat” we got a look into Poe’s life and into his mind. If we are not going to listen to multiple theories, lets atleast listen to the source of this

The Narrator in “The Black Cat” is explained as a man who fell into alcoholism and let deception take control over his mindset (Poe 79). His change of perspective over things causes him to believe his beloved first black cat (Pluto) is evil and demonic when the cat bites him one day (Poe 80). During the illusion from the excessive alcohol, he hangs Pluto (Poe 80). From guilt further on from killing his first cat, the narrator adopts another black cat. A while later, he comes to believe that the new cat has the same characteristics that Pluto had (Poe 82). In an act of fit from the new Black cat almost tripping him on the cellar stairs, the narrator starts to try to kill him with an axe (Poe 84). His wife comes in and tries to stop him, but instead that causes him to kill her. The narrator hides his wife’s body in a cellar wall, meanwhile the cat vanished (Poe 84). Four days later, the police came to do a thorough search. The narrator acted strangely calm and innocent, as if he had done nothing. They discovered her corpse with the cat standing on her head howling in the cellar wall though, and took the narrator into custody. (Poe 85-86).

Alcohol can increase or bring out the anger that a person has, it can influence them to do things that they would not do in a everyday scenario and cause them to lash out instead of dealing with the situation rationally. At alchoholism.about.com they say "Alcohol intoxication brings out people's natural tendencies in the expression of anger" saying that maybe for our narrator even though he was a kind hearted person he may have had anger that he let out while drinking, connecting him symptoms of drug abuse. When he begins to drink in the story he starts to take out some of his anger on his pets, but never Pluto, his cat. As his drug abuse with alcohol worsens he completely stops caring and feeling remorse, tearing out the eye of his best friend Pluto. His anger consumes him as he consumes more alcohol and it changes him into a violent person.

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.

Throughout all the short stories and poems wrote by Edgar Allan Poe, some connections can be made on the content. The Black Cat, and The Raven, are two narratives wrote by Poe, that unveil the themes and symbols he often uses in his work. Poe is on the mysterious side, but he is also taking the life he is given, and making his narratives raw and realist by some degree. Poe uses techniques that left him express his imagination through writing. There are many different ideas and questions rising from all his work. The Black Cat and The Raven, are two narratives that use similar themes and symbols that allow readers to receive a small connection of the madness inside of the narrators.

Similarly, just like in “The Black Cat” the narrator makes a bad decision that ends up leading to a big amount of guilt from another cat that reminds him of Pluto and, then leads him to also killing his wife and the second cat. “I caught the cat and hung him by his neck from a tree until he was dead” (“The Black”Poe 2). “I was sure it was because of my wife’s murder: he was too clever to come near me now” (“The Black” Poe 3). This is showing that the narrator ends up killing his whole

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.

Although now seen as the father of the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was previously viewed as a drunken failure. Within Poe’s writings much of his own life riddled with guilt, anxiety, alcohol, depression and death shines through resulting in works that appear unrelated yet once dissected prove similar. This is true for Poe’s works “The Raven” and “The Black Cat”. Poe’s examples of gothic fiction share the use of the color black and a rapid digression of the narrator 's sanity while seemingly unveiling Poe’s internal pain. Despite these similarities, Poe’s works also differ immensely. “The Black Cat” focuses around death while “The Raven” is fixed around discovering the reasoning for a bird 's arrival. Moreover, gothic themes seen within “The Raven” do not necessarily remain constant when compared to “The Black Cat”.

Sometimes the darkest stories are written to reveal the reality of someone’s life. Edgar Allan Poe was just one of many writers who portrayed their life in their writing. In one of his many pieces called The Black Cat, he makes the narrator an alcoholic just like he was in real life. Poe endures a hard childhood with abuse, neglect, and lack of love. In the story he shows this by having the narrator abuse his wife and cat. He also doesn’t like her wife and neglects her much of the time. Poe is also showing how he was messed up from such a harsh childhood and portrays this by making the narrator insane and murdering his cat while being sober. In his marriage his wife became ill and died and in his story the narrator murders his wife. This could be a metaphorical murder because Poe was poor and couldn’t buy his wife the medicine she needed to get better.

In the short story, “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator details a series of violent actions against both his pet cat and wife. The transformation of the narrator is revealed by his out of character behavior brought on by his alcohol abuse. The narrator's diction, point of view, and tone help unravel his transition into insanity and indulgence into his perverse nature. In this story, the narrator begins by saying he considers himself to be a perfectly normal person, known for his love of people and most importantly animals.

In The Black Cat, Poe describes a man that is about to be put to death for the murder of his wife. Again Poe introduces the main character as a well-mannered gentleman that gives into his vices and feels guilty for it.

Stories like the “black cat”, “The tell- tale heart”, “The masque of the red death”, and “Morella” all deal with horror, murder, and sudden death. The short story, ‘The black cat’ gives the audience a story line visual of the mind of an alcoholic and the way his behavior changes over time, in different scenarios the character starts to turn abusive to the animals that he once loved. The man then starts to isolate himself from the black cat which was his favorite animal until one day he snaps and kills the black cat by hanging it to a tree with a rope. Days later a cat comes back around him that shows almost the same identity of the black cat, but the only difference is the white patch which is the bottom part of the cat body. the man then starts to grow jealous as his wife shows attention to the new cat which then leads him to murder his wife and stuffing her dead body in a wall, he later confesses to the crime and spends life in prison. This story is very dark and gives a clear identification of the mind of a troubled individual who then takes out his anger by being abusive to the animals in his environment and later his wife. Different aspects in Poe’s stories look deep into the mind of a person and the reasons that leads to murder and death.