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Little Ball of Fur: The Black Cat Essay

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Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809. Many consider him to be the master of mystery and horror. He only lived until he was forty, and during that time he endured a lot of hardships. For one, every woman he ever cared for ended up dead, usually by the dreaded tuberculosis. That included his wife Virginia. The men in his life who were supposed to be there to guide him, well, they were not there. I think that helped him write a lot of his dark and macabre stories. His most famous work is The Raven, a narrative poem that was first published in January 1845. He also wrote other highly regarded short stories such as, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Tell- Tale Heart, and The Black Cat. I will be doing my review on the latter…show more content…
Poe creates a narrator that loses his humanness. The narrator kills his cat and wife due to mere fits of rage. A sane person would not do that. Poe basically has his narrator starts telling the story at his mad point. Poe had his narrator realize his deterioration but also an inability to stop it from happening. The narrator's madness was exasperated by an addiction to alcohol. From the story, "But my disease grew upon me - for what disease is like alcohol?" (Poe 199). I think Mr. Poe is saying that alcohol can push people over the edge. The narrator already had his demons that he had been able to keep in check until he went on a drinking binge. From there on out, things unraveled. It is said that Mr. Poe himself struggled with alcoholism (cite). It is quite possible that he drew up that aspect of the narrator makeup from his own life. And on a minor note, Edgar Allan Poe also uses this story to present the age old "no crime goes unpunished" bit. He has a narrator that believes that he has gotten away with his crime. Poe presents a person who is so ho-hum after a heinous crime, the murder of his wife, but that does not last very long. Poe uses the cat as an antagonizing figure that foils his narrator's perfect crime.
I have to agree with Edgar Allan Poe in regards to the alcoholism. I think we have all seen to some capacity the negative affect alcohol can have on an already strained situation. It really is like throwing a gallon of gasoline
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