The Black Cat Literary Analysis

The author gives a description of short story writer, poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe's place in the history of the U.S. is presented. As literary editor of "Graham's Lady's" and "Gentleman's Magazine," Poe became a major figure in American letters. Although his heavy drinking cost him his job, Poe continued to write in a cool style that was the polar opposite of his romantic poems and horror stories. Thomas Fleming gives details for his main idea that Poe’s works are widely known due to his technique of writing. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” is perfect examples of his suspenseful writing technique that grabs his audience, holds on to readers throughout the entire story and leaves the audience on the edge of their seats. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are always thought of as being suspenseful and extremely dramatic. To achieve the suspense in Edgar Allen Poe’s, he uses gothic imagery to help add an unknown, eerie effect. The author, Thomas Fleming, gives an example with “…with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable

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

	In Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Black Cat," symbolism is used to show the narrator’s capacity for violence, madness, and guilt. "The Black Cat," written by Edgar Allan Poe serves as a reminder for all of us. The Capacity for violence and horror lies within each of

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

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).

Edgar Allen Poe is known to many as a very talented and interesting writer in his time. However, unlike many other authors, Poe was not successful during his lifetime at all. He was very poor and depressed from the loss of his loved ones, and also was a heavy drinker. In his poems and short stories, he uses the experiences of losing his loved ones and manifests them differently in his works. In some of his stories, he incorporates these losses similarly, and yet he does have some differences in his works. In two of his works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, he uses the fatalities of his mother and wife to write two great stories. Although “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe seem similar on the surface

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 Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, it becomes apparent how important the element of horror is to him. Poe’s use of first person point of view and gothic style of storytelling seems to compel readers. The reader can almost feel as if they are part of the story with every twist and turn keeping readers at the edge of their seats. Poe’s creates a feeling of horror in the readers mind by using strong language

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

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”.

Is “The Black Cat” a horror story? Yes! When the reader reads the black cat they can tell it’s a horror story. Many creepy things happen in “The Black Cat”. "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe is a horror story because the main characters insanity/addiction is an internal monster, the man commits the crimes in creepy places, and the reader cares more about what the main character is going to do next instead of the main character as a human.

In Edgar A. Poe’s,“ The Black Cat”, Poe gives us a suspension that black cats could be perhaps witches. By this sudden attempt to question the supernatural, Poe goes further into his storyline to make the reader feel disgusted and repulsed by what his character does to the animals. Little does he know that his actions will have a consequence. Other references of horror elements is that he foreshadows almost every part of the story. For example; Pluto, (The new cat) had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast. This white spot was definitely in the shape of a hangman’s noose.

As a master of short stories of horror, Edgar Allan Poe is knowledgeable, learned and imaginative. He could skillfully manipulate the words in his literary works to create everything people can think of. The masterful use of the symbols, objects intensify the readers’ nerve as the typical elements of horror in Poe’s short stories, and therefore it is also a feature which makes Poe 's stories different from other writers.