The Black Cat Mentally Insane

Edgar Allan Poe was an extraordinary author whose horror and mystery stories leave an impression on readers even today. In some of Poe’s works, the narrator’s thoughts and actions make the reader question the narrator’s sanity. Two good examples are Poe’s poem “The Raven” and his short story “The Black Cat”; there is plenty of evidence to support that both of the narrators are not completely sane. In Poe’s “The Raven” and “The Black Cat,” both narrators exhibit symptoms of mental illness, including hallucinations, illogical thinking, mood swings, and substance abuse.

Edgar Allan Poe shows his insanity in the Black Cat through irony. The narrator says in the begining of the story; "My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events"(1). Later readers discover the fact that the events are in no way mere household events, buts much more gruesome and highlights the narrator's perverseness. Later, the narrator buries his wife in a very loosely constructed wall, yet when the police come by he tells them; "By the bye, gentlemen, this - this is a very well constructed house"(5). As he tells them this he knocks against the wall and the cat cries. This stirs the policemen and we soon realize it was not a well constructed wall as the bricks

When it comes to the mind of the of the narrator, we see through his telling of the story as being a part of his past, his attempt at making us believe he was sane. In my mind, it was more of an attempt for him to make himself believe he was completely sane.

Tell-Tale Heart: Comprehension and Annotation The Tell-Tale Heart is about a man who committed murder and slowly begins to lose his sanity. “True!-Nervous- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled them.” When the character talks about his disease, he’s talking about Schizophrenia which is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.

The narrator spends a great amount time carefully planning out the murder of the innocent old man, but demonstrates no logical reason for killing the old man, which makes the narrator appear mad. The narrator

“ I cut off the head and the arms and the legs” is a line from his story the Tell Tale Heart. One example is he had wanted an eye from an old man, and so the character suffocated the man, cut up his body, and hid him under the floorboards out of anger and selfishness. His anger made him seem very abusive and very harsh. One other example is in The Black Cat, when the character was about to kill another one of his cats, his wife put her hand on the cat to stop him, and so he killed her too. He put both of their bodies inside his wall, in which the police had figured out due to hearing a cry from the cat in which was still alive. This Madness can relate to his life because he went through madness when he lost his wife and so him killing his wife was basically how it felt when he lost

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity”. A quote from one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more famous stories The Tell Tale Heart. Edgar Allan Poe’s writing is still famous to this day. Not only his writing but his life. He is known for having a difficult life and writing about it in a not so obvious way. Through all his poems and short stories there are little hints everywhere that relate to his life. Depression, insanity and Tuberculosis were all common topics from Poe’s writing that related to his life.

For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him”. He abused all the other animals and even his wife but he never hurt Pluto. The first black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s evil heart. It shows favouritism and obsession with black cats from the start this story, later after he had murdered Pluto, he still went out and realised when he saw the second cat that it is what he was looking for. “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.”. The second black cat is symbolic of the narrator’s guilt. This fact about the cat made him hate more simply because he felt guilty of what he had done to Pluto. His guilt and religious torment gives us an insight to his insanity.

6. The main character eventually mistreats the cat because of his alcoholic addiction and Pluto attacking him. On page 2, it reads, “One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth.” Initially, Pluto began to realize the main character’s alcohol consumption was changing him as a person so he was trying to keep his distance.

At the beginning of the story, the man was essentially “happy” with his wife and black cat, Pluto. The story is light until the man begins drinking. He has begun to like that the cat did not want to be around him and avoided his presence anymore. This is possibly due to the fact that he is not happy with his drinking. However, one night when he came home and frightened the cat, which

Before the episode of killing Pluto, the narrator, after returning home drunk and sensing that the cat was avoiding his company, seized it violently. During this physical bout the cat

In “The Black Cat,” the man was married to a patient and caring woman. They acquired another cat that, according to the man, looked remarkably like Pluto (709). One day, the cat almost tripped the man while they were walking down a flight of stairs. This “exasperated” the man “to madness” (Poe 709). He lifted an axe and “aimed a blow at the animal,” (Poe 709).

He praises himself and embraces certainty that he would not be caught, in the way narcissists are self-confident and self-praising. That night, he sleeps peacefully. When the police comes to investigate the house, his smugness gives him away. They hear the black cat inside the wall with the corpse, and that is how the narrator is caught. The black cat could symbolize his unconscious guilt and the embodiment of his conscience, for he has followed him throughout the entire story. Even after the narrator executed Pluto, another black cat appeared and replaced him. After a while, the second cat grew very uncannily similar to Pluto, both in appearance and behavior, and he brought on the defeat of the narcissistic

In the beginning, the narrator gave a confession in retrospect; he was an honorable man born as a sane, kind, loving. Additionally, he had a great love for animals. He married a girl at a young age. Their house was like a mini zoo; birds, gold fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat. The man singles out a huge, beautiful all-black cat as his favorite, named Pluto. Because of its unusual intelligence, the wife jokes around that the cat might be a witch in disguise. Over the course of time, the narrator and Pluto created a strong bond between them.

He gradually changes from being a pet lover who also adores his wife to a person who tortures regularly his animals and wife (Habich, 1). It’s pretty hard for the reads to adjust with his psychological changes and effects. the main character is shown as a very gentle and loving person who is fond of animals. If the story is not read analytically, the reader can say that his