The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

Written by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” is a famous short poem known for the dark fantasy that it portrays. From the mindset of a first person narrative, one may experience the tale through the eyes of a haunted man who is in mourning for the death of his beloved Lenore. As this man sits in his chamber, within a dark and dreary December night, a “raven of the saintly days of yore” visits him. The raven is no ordinary bird, for it is like a ghost, silent, yet it answers every inquiry the man presents in it’s own personal way. This dark and tragic tale grabs one’s attention through the rhythmic, yet melancholy verses, through the classic references, and through the dark imagery that all play a critical role within this poem.

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.

In the story “The Black Cat”, by Edgar Allen Poe, there is a fine line between sanity and insanity. “The Black Cat” tells the story of him having great admiration for animals, especially his black cat, Pluto. Poe loved this cat more than any animal and had a friendship with it for several years. He started getting more irritable day by day, but refrained from harming the cat. One night, Edgar Allen Poe was drunk, and Pluto bit his hand. Poe then grabbed a knife and gauged the cat’s eye out. Then one morning, Poe hung a noose around Pluto’s neck and put him on a tree. After the cat’s death, he started seeing a cat that looked exactly like Pluto, but he was angered by it. The cat was following him around and refraining him from standing, and

Have you ever thought about why people choose to make the choices they make? There is controversy over if people are able to make their own choices. Almost all of the time you have full control over your decisions. You have the ability to follow the rules if you want to and know that there could be a good or bad consequence to what you do. An individual has the power to choose their response in any situation.

Even if one feels they may have 'gotten away ' with a crime, the weight of a person’s conscience cannot be concealed. In someone’s life, too much power and control combined with a person’s conscience in a person’s life can and will lead to an imbalance and perhaps insanity as in the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates how the narrator in this story goes through the greed and need for control, leading to his insanity that results in extreme guilt.

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.

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”.

Edgar Allan Poe is prominent for his literacy style of horror and mystery, in which he had written an innumerable number of short stories and poems in his lifetime. Evidently, many of his writings like, “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” and “The Raven,” share the same style, as their protagonists’ demonstrated a paucity of reliability. Readers often become engaged with how the main character of each text showed their rivulet of tales that seem to be quite fictitious. Available evidence suggests that all three narrators had the lack of accuracy and reliability, which could possibly result from psychological disorders.

The Sleeper, by Edgar Allan Poe, was first published in the Poems of 1831; this poem has since been revised from its current version which was printed in 1845. This poem was written during the Romanticism Period. This time period is defined as a time in which poets began to “rebel against the Neoclassical restrictions and dominance of reason as poetic aim. Romantic poetry celebrated the imagination over rationality, passion, and dreams over reason and external reality, and isolated individuality over collective humankind. Romantic poetry looked to celebrate both the supernatural and elevate the commonplace.” (Henriksen) Poe’s imagination prevails in this lyric poem. The speaker of the poem experiences an internal conflict while mourning

In Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence condemns Americans for dodging their true selves by means of intellectualization and idealization. Both Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” feature allegorical representations of characters deceiving themselves in order to deny the darker aspects of their inner selves. In Poe’s “The Black Cat,” the narrator denies the darker aspects of his soul by abstracting his horrific actions with spectral evidence in order to externalize the psychological effects of his guilt. In his allegorical tale “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne criticizes the Puritan doctrine of grace in his depiction of the self-deception Lawrence condemns; both

"The Black Cat", in which the narrator related a series of "most wild" yet "most homely" events he went through, is one of Edgar Allan Poe's masterpieces. The narrator first told readers that he had loved animals so much that he was often laughed at by his companions. He and his wife had many pets, among which a giant black cat called Pluto was their favourite. But it has all changed since he became an alcoholic. He suddenly lost his temper and his love for animals. He began to abuse them, including Pluto. He digged out its eyes because the cat, out of terror, bit him, and then he hung it because he thought Pluto was avoiding him. That night his house caught a fire and they were reduced to an old house due to poverty. One day he found a cat

It was the philosopher Thomas Hobbes that proposed the idea that Man is by nature evil or beast like. The History of the human kind goes hand in hand with violence and chaos. By nature, man has a primitive killer instinct, and this is the reason why human beings yearn for blood and violence. In modern society, there are rules and laws to prevent individuals from committing crimes and other forms of savagery. The reason why people enjoy the works of Poe is the same reason why people enjoy watching movies like Saw or playing videogames like Grand Theft Auto; it provides an escape from the mundane, and helps one get in touch with one’s animalistic side. In The Black Cat, Poe could be making a comment on the idea that human beings are by nature

In the short story, The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, Poe conveys many different types of the horror genre. During the early 1800s, he wrote many short stories and poems that belonged to the horror genre. His famous works are, “The Raven”, “The Tell Tale Heart”, and “The Pendulum”. Over 400 years later, all of his stories are still recognized today and read by many, making him one of the best writers of all time. In the story “The Black Cat”, it starts with a man explaining the last few horrific days of his life. The man then goes on with his early life and his tendency to nurture and love animals. He becomes an alcoholic, and learns that he is violent and disturbed my his wife and animals. As the story progresses he continues to find anger within himself to make him harm his family.

The title of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” leads the reader to believe the short story is about one black cat. However, almost in the middle of the story, a second cat emerges. Since the title suggest there is only one cat, and the narrator hints the second cat is one of the first cat’s nine lives, comparison of the cats become necessary to see if they are one and the same. For example, both cats desire to be around the narrator and both are missing an eye, but each cat has a major difference in the color of their fur.