Essay about Psychoanalyzing 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

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.

The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe is a horror story about a man who loses everything he once had due to his alcohol use/abuse. The story begins when the narrator confesses his love for animals. The narrator marries a woman and introduces her to a black cat, named Pluto. The narrator begins to suffer from violent and uncontrollable mood swings, caused from influence of alcohol. After coming home drunk one night the narrator lashes out at Pluto, he quickly tries to grab the cat, only to be bitten.

In Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat," the nameless narrator begins his horrifying tale by informing his readers that he

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).

“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.

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 Black Cat” is a short story that was written by Edgar Allan Poe, which was published in August 19, 1843. This story is about an unnamed narrator who is writing in his prison cell. The reason he is writing this is because he is going to be hung, due to the actions he writes about, and he wants to set the record straight. He starts by saying that when he was a child, he had always loved animals. He shows that he was a kind hearted man who loved animals and would not do anything to hurt them until he started to drink.

"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.

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

During parts of ‘The Black Cat,’ Poe speaks of getting along with the cat. However, there is a point in the

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.

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.

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.