Essay about Psychoanalyzing the Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe is well-known for his captivating tales of the macabre through eloquence and wit. In many of his short stories, Poe was able to exploit his audience's fears through allegory and descriptive details of murder and madness. One of Poe's captivating, yet mad, narrators helms "The Black Cat," a tale of paranoia, alcoholism, and murder. There are several things that make the narrator an intriguing character including his psychological state, the imp of the perverse, and the effect that alcoholism has on him.

The Black Cat is one of Poe’s most memorable stories. The story was first published in 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. This like a study of the psychology of guilt, paired with other works by Poe. “Near the beginning of the tale, the narrator says he would be "mad indeed" if he should expect a reader to believe the story, implying that he has already been accused of madness” (Cleman). Poe is creating a sense of confusion for the readers and making them think more about the story before reading. The story is centered around a black cat and the idea of deterioration of a man. From his prison cell, the narrator is writing the story about his life which is falling apart. He has a love for animals, and for his wife that he married young. One of the things that he takes on as a hobby, is

The general mood throughout Poe’s The Black Cat is frightening and evokes an uneasy feeling in the reader. The narrator prefaces the story by telling the reader that, “For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief” (1). This at first excites the reader, but also leaves a feeling of uneasiness due to the uncertainty of the nature of the story. However, the narrator quickly reveals the story does not end well for him when he says, “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul” (1). The mood of The Black Cat is also developed in the horror element of character and the uncanny. Poe’s use of dreary details exhibit the frightening mood of The Black Cat.

“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.

The narrator even claims not to be crazy, but then he goes on to think and act in such a way that the reader would label him as insane. Although Poe does not provide an explanation for the narrator's loss of sanity, Poe does hint that madness might happen at any time to any person, just like how the narrator transforms from a gentle animal lover into an evil killer. The narrator does address the fact that he is an alcoholic, “But my disease grew upon me - for what disease is like Alcohol” (Poe 46). Professor McMurran, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham, says that, "Alcohol reduces our ability to think straight, it narrows our focus of attention and gives us tunnel vision. If someone provokes us while we're drunk, we don't take other factors into account, such as consequences, this can lead to violent reactions from people who would usually shrug things off” (Alcohol and Aggression).

The events that unfolded in Edgar Allen Poe’s, “The black Cat,” are all due to one person, the narrator. It is because of his Mental state, being an alcoholic, and being abusive to his wife and pets that the fault lies heavily on the narrator. What this paper will entail is all three of the reasons why it is the narrator's fault for what happens in the story and it will come to a conclusion based off the findings in the story.

When enraged over the immense waves of love and affection being sent to him from his second cat, the Nameless Narrator, filled with “the fury of a demon,” pulled out an ax to strike the cat and accidentally hit his wife instead. Rather than taking deep breaths, having a cup of tea or meditating, his instinct reactions was to pull out a weapon and kill. The Nameless Narrators brash, imprudent acts of animosity and wrath give the reader surges of fear and timidity.

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe is a horror story of an insane man telling us of his crimes. The narrator was just a regular man with a drinking problem until one day when he came home and gouged out his cat’s eye. But his hostility only got worse, to the point where he hung the cat in the back yard. His actions only further prove that he wasn’t in his right mind when he committed these crimes.

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 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).

When looking at a piece of literature through a psychological approach it is easy to apply Sigmund Freud’s theories of the id, ego, and superego, which focus on conscious and unconscious behavior. When analyzing many of Poe’s works, critics tend to look through a psychological lens. Specifically in Poe’s The Black Cat. Some critics believe that Poe’s alcoholism is reflected in the piece, but many, such as James W. Gargano “advised the tales readers to avoid the biographical pitfall of seeing Poe and the first-person narrator of The Black Cat as ‘identical literary twins’” (Piacentino 1). It is due to his childhood that Poe’s narrator in The Black Cat subconsciously places animals before humans, thus leading to him to murder his wife.

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is one of Poe’s greatest literary works that embodies his signature themes of death, violence, and darkness. Poe’s main character begins his narration of his horrible wrongdoings regarding them as a “series of mere household events” (Poe 705). However, this is where Poe’s satire and irony begins and the story progresses to show the deranged mindset of this character as he tries to justify his actions. As the main character proceeds to rationalize his crime, Poe is able to convey a sense of irony through his use of foreshadowing, metaphors and symbolism.

Poe gives many gruesome and frightening details that make “The Black Cat” a horror fiction short story. Horror fiction is a genre of fiction designed to startle, frighten, or disgust the reader by inducing feelings of horror. Poe inducing feelings of horror through things that take place in the story such as the stabbing of Pluto, the first cat. When Poe wrote, “I took from my waistcoat pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of the eyes from the socket!” (Poe 436), he gives the reader a startled and disgusting feeling due to the gruesome depth of the sentence. Poe “darkens” the story even more with the hanging of Pluto and his wife’s murder. Poe writes about his wife’s murder and he gives evil details on the ideas of burying her in his

"Insert clever quote of your choice here". This quote from "The Black Cat" perfectly illustrates the psychological undertones present in Edgar Allan Poe's work. Poe is known for using various techniques to show the reader the darkness that lies in the minds of men. One such technique involves telling the entire story from the point of view of a single character, whose account becomes less and less believable as the story goes on. Another concept that is present in many of his works is "The Uncanny" - a feeling of unease caused by something that is both familiar and strange at the same time. This essay will analyze and demonstrate the use of the uncanny in Poe's "The Black Cat", and how it's used to bring us inside the troubled mind of the protagonist.

We see the reverse psychology in the narrator as he gradually changes from someone gentle to a murderer in the story (Snodgrass, 1). From the beginning of the story we find that the narrator is in prison for the crimes that he recently committed and he is writing down his crime to “unburden his soul”. In this story, we see how gentle the narrator was as a kid. “From my infancy, I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the rest of my companions” (Poe,1). The unsanctified and selfless love he has for animals can never lead anyone to believe that the narrator can kill his pet, but his psychological change makes him do so.