The Underworld's Revenge In The Black Cat By Edgar A. Poe

that black is symbolic of evil and darkness. The first black cat was the victim of the narrator’s evil and violent heart.

To conclude this argument it is very clear that the actions that took place in, “The black cat,” are the narrators fault. It is on account of him being an alcoholic, being in a poor mental state, and being abusive to his wife and pets that the fault lies in the

The storyteller begins the story by stating from an early age he has had an obsession with animals. Poe states, “This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure.” (Poe) This statement is evidence of the insanity the narrator experienced at a very young age. He goes on to explain that he and his wife have many domesticated animals, including Pluto, a large beautiful black cat. He describes the mutual fondness between him and the cat. This relationship between him and the cat, is strange. For years they have a growing friendship, until he started drinking alcohol in excess. The narrator goes on to explain how one night after getting completely intoxicated, the cat panicked and bit him. This causes the author to become angry and in a psychotic fit of rage, he takes a knife and cuts out one of the cat’s eyes. After this encounter, the cat fears him, and tries to avoid him at all cost. In the beginning, the storyteller is regretful and feels remorseful for the cruelty. But soon we see the narrator’s insanity expressed when Poe states, “But this feeling soon gave place

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.

reader develops an inference that the narrator may not make it out of the situation alive. Comparatively, the narrator from “The Black Cat” has the same point of view as the narrator in “The Man in the Black Suit.” The husband in “The Black Cat” seems to believe that he is alone until he meets this cat named Pluto who genuinely loved him. The narrator faces a hardship when he says “...I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;-hung it because I knew that in doing so I was committing a sin…” (Poe 2). Through this quote, readers can infer that the narrator had a problem mentally and according to the

Throughout the story, the narrator consistently blames the cat for his problems and denies madness, indicating the signs of insanity defense. For instance, as soon as the story begins, the narrator claims that he is not “mad” and nor is his story a “dream”. Since most of Poe’s stories are gruesome, one can predict this story will be no different and more like a “nightmare” instead. For this reason, the narrator seems unconvincing when he states that the actions that arise in his home are “mere household events”. The contradictory narrator denies insanity yet intentionally reveals it through his vicious behavior toward his wife and Pluto, making readers question his sanity after all. The narrator’s use of insanity defense allows him

One would ponder upon the narrator's consciousness that his misery would create an ability to find "joy" in having the sweet creature around again. Surprisingly, the author grows "disgusted and annoyed" by the cat's presence again, which gradually rises into "bitterness of hatred" and he looks upon the cat "with unutterable loathing" (325). The cat's excessive pertinacity of overly affectionate personality towards its master grows a repulsive reflex into the narrator such that he perceives the cat's "loathsome caress," its "odious presence" like a "breath of pestilence" rather than its loving personality and loyalty (325). "Evil thoughts bec[o]me my[his] soul intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts," which lead him to commit a brutal murder towards his own wife thus representing the destructive revelation of the plot (i.e., self-destruction in this particular story) (326).

A couple of days later, the same cat is found with one eye cut out, just like Pluto, and many readers speculate that the cat was actually a resurrected Pluto. The missing eye can, however, be explained by the narrator’s erratic behavior while drunk. If he was capable of cutting out Pluto’s eye and forgetting about doing so by drowning himself in wine, nothing was stopping the narrator from doing the same to the new cat and merely forgetting about it due to alcohol. Moreover, another source of paranoia for the narrator was the new cat’s constant presence. The cat was always around the narrator and even slept by his side, though the narrator himself took this as a tactic of haunting that the cat was using in order to freak him out. The behavior can of course be explained reasonably by the fact that the cat was a cat and merely wanted to be around his owner. In addition, what caused the narrator to truly despise the cat was a gallows shaped white spot that became more and more evident the longer he was with the family. This can also be explained by the narrator’s alcohol problem and abusive behavior as cat hair grows back white when they are scarred. In his drunken state, the narrator could have been harming the cat and causing him to scar, perhaps even making the scars in the shape of a gallows to punish himself with the reminder of

After killing his cat, Pluto, the narrator describes seeing a similar cat in his home. The first time he saw the identical cat was immediately after he had been drinking. The circumstances in which the new cat was introduced makes it difficult to know if there even was a second cat or if the vision of the cat was a product of the narrator’s guilt. This is because, in some cases, when an individual is surmounted by guilty feelings they can invent different things to make them feel less guilty. Sometimes that could be finding someone else to blame, but for the narrator of “The Black Cat” it was getting drunk and pretending that the cat was still alive so he did not feel responsible for his death.

Purgatory is a temporary stage in which a person experiences suffering as punishment. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The Raven”, animals appear in the lives of the protagonists, revealing the bleak fates which they will have to endure; it is their own versions of purgatory. The contribution of the demonic animals the narrators encounter combined with the tolls their obsessions take on them, leads them to find themselves in a purgatory-like stage after which they will succumb to death. Despite the similarities between the two, such as the fact that they are both animals of a demonic nature, the protagonist in “The Black Cat” reacts violently and shows little sense of genuine remorse, while the protagonist in “The Raven” is devastated and mourning not only the death of Lenore, but the death of his soul. “The Black Cat” is about once loving and friendly narrator whose life takes a turn for the worse.

     Later that night, the narrator is awakened by fire in his house and immediately exited it. All but one wall of the house was destroyed. After the blaze was put out, a large crowd gathered around the remaining wall and were amazed at how a wall in the middle of the house could remain standing after a fire. The narrator approached the wall and thought that he knew what the audience is commenting about. He saw a gigantic cat with a rope around its neck. He is filled with wonder and terror when he saw that the cat is alive. In reality, though, the cat is not alive; the narrator is just having a delusion, which is a symptom of paranoia. He quickly calms his worries about how the cat survived by saying that an onlooker watching the fire must have seen that the cat was tied to the tree and released it. Making oneself believe what is not true is also a sign of paranoia. The cat could not have been alive because it was hung from the tree in the morning, while the fire started late at night.

Edgar Allen Poe is popularly known as an author who perceives human behavior differently in his work as compared to other authors. This is eminent in his two short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.” In these stories, he displays characters as insane by pointing out various instances in which madness is depicted. For instance, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator kills the old man because he has got interested in his eyes. Similarly, in “The Black Cat,” the narrator is also seen making efforts to murder his cat, however, his wife secures the life of the cat.

The fact is that the way the narrator starts off the story, by describing himself in an overly immaculate way, leads one to the assumption that he is unreliable. However, if he was not as pure of heart from his youth as he insists then the explanation must be that the potential to be evil was contained within the narrator from the day he was born. Indeed, what Edgar Allen Poe was trying to illustrate in the “Black Cat” is that the potential to get to a point where conscience doesn't exist lies within each and every one of us.

Poe’s life is similar to his stories, “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat. Common themes in Poe’s writing and life are loss, death, anger and guilt. In both of the stories, the point of view comes from an unreliable first-person narrator. Yet even though both admit guilt, Poe focuses on imagery to describe the narrator’s transformation to Christ, after sinning. In both stories that the narrator’s admission of guilt is asking for forgiveness for his sins.

Moreover, it has been argued that the cat is a metaphor for the narrator’s wife. Critics claim that the following passage raises suspicion that the killing of the first cat was actually the murder of his own wife. Poe writes: Norton Anthology American Literature. 7th. 1. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. 705-711. Print.