The stories “The Black Cat” and “Hop-Frog” by Edgar Allan Poe are similar based on the presence of twisted love and the lack of guilt.…
"No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal- the redness and the horror of blood" (1). Edgar Allan Poe was a master of the macabre; his very stories injecting fear into the hearts of his readers. Poe's life was filled with tragedy, as several of the important women in his life, including his wife and daughter died at a young age. He utilized poems and books to express that tragedy. The short stories, "The Black Cat," and, "The Masque of the Red Death," both written by Poe, enhance the theme of fear. "The Black Cat," was about a narrator who had gone crazy and was so overcome by guilt that he went to extreme measures including…
Edgar Allan Poe, reputed as the father of American short stories, is a poet, writer and literary critic of nineteenth century. His works, most of which explore the dark side of consciousness and subconsciousness of human beings, was well-known for horror and mystery. "The Black Cat" is one of Poe's masterpieces. It depicts love, hatred and fear between men through the narration of the changing relationship between a mentally abnormal man and a black cat. Loneliness, death, torture and abnormal psychology are core elements in "The Black Cat" This thesis aims to conduct a research on how Allan Poe managed to achieve psychological horror in "The Black Cat."…
The Black Cat”, written by Edgar Allen Poe on August 19, 1843. “The Black Cat” is the best title for this poem because of what it symbolizes and its…
The problems of alcoholism and insanity are recurring themes in Poe’s literary works. One can say that “The Black Cat,” one of Poe’s short stories, portrays much of the author’s own views on his substance abuse problems and mental illness. The unnamed narrator from “The Black Cat,” struggles with his addiction to alcohol and his hatred for two cats become prevailing. The narrator states, however, that he was never like this before he loved animals, “never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.” (Poe, 3). The narrator takes on a cat and cares for it, however, as his drinking problem progressed, he states, “I grew day by day more moody… my disease grew upon me.” (Poe, 4). After a night out drinking, he decides to cut out one of the cat’s eyes and ultimately, kills the cat. Later, another cat strangely identical to the first cat with one eye comes around and as the narrator tries to kill the second cat he ends up killing his wife instead. He buries the body of his wife and the second cat behind a wall and police later hear the cat calling out from inside the wall. In relation to Poe’s life, Poe was known to love cats and had a female cat named Catterina (Mercier). The killing of the first cat relates to Poe’s own destruction of the things he loved and desired due to alcoholism. He lost his job in 1837 due to his drinking and feuding with other editors (Edgar Allan Poe, Encyclo.) The killing of an innocent wife can closely relate to Poe’s views of women in his own life, through the deaths of both his mother figures and then eventually his wife. Poe writes about women who carry a unique beauty to them. The women are compassionate to the men they…
The human mind is difficult to understand as every human possesses his/her own individual thought rituals at different levels of complexities. From a psychological approach the point(s) to get across are to reveal the revelation of its author’s mind and personality. In other words, how the literature is linked with the author’s mental and emotional characteristics. Today, psychology has been introduced in most everything. Before the field of Psychology was introduced an American author, Edgar Allan Poe, was deeply aware of the complexities of the human mind and its effects on behavior. His comprehension of the human brain is embedded in short stories such as, “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Edgar Allan Poe presents protagonists…
In Poe’s “The Black Cat”, the main symbol of the story is the black cat,hence the title. Throughout the story,Poe has written different allusions of what the cats had represented over time. First,Poe had wrote that the narrator’s wife believes in superstitions,going back to the ancient popular notion of “all black cats as witches in disguise”.(Paragraph 4) Poe was referencing to the witch trials,when Pluto was hanged and burned when the narrator’s house burned down. Fire and hangings were elements from the witch trials.…
Poe’s stories; stories both feared, and loved. Poe lived a very mysterious life. He was known as an alcoholic, and a drug addict, but who was Poe? We know that his childhood was rough, and that death took away many of his loved ones. He had many tragedies in his life, and only lived to be 40. Two of Poe’s stories, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Black Cat,” are not similar in any ways, except the recurring deaths in the plot. The characters, setting, and conflict are also elements of fiction that make these two different stories unique.…
Poe and the narrator in The Black Cat both have a drinking problem, which is noticeable when the narrator describes the room, “reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogshead of gin, or of rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment” (Pg. 226). Poe and the narrator both also had a loving wife who died, although one died of tuberculosis and one of murder. Moreover, both had a mental illness. Poe faced depression that influenced his life and the narrator is clearly unstable and apathetic.…
The Bible gives one of the earliest and most famous accounts of the origins of sin and evil. In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve, who at first live peacefully and without sin in the Garden of Eden, break God's only law by eating an apple from the forbidden tree. An angry God places a curse on Adam, Eve, and all future peoples so that they will now be born with original sin, thus allowing evil to enter the world. Since this ancient story, many have attempted to understand further the development of evil inside the soul of man. A literary pattern has developed which reveals the growth of evil and perverseness inside its characters in the Gothic romance. Gothic romances attempt to create effects of the frightful and perverse through displaying…
People make mistakes in life just like the narrator in the story “The Black Cat.” He has done two of the worst mistakes in his life drinking and killing his cat. The sitting is in the narrator's house. The main conflict is that the narrator kills his chat because he has a problem with drinking. In “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allan Poe used drinking as a symbol of evil.…
The author shows these struggles through the use of metaphors, irony, and symbolism. First, Edgar Allen Poe uses symbolism to show the consequences the narrator faces. The black cat, Pluto, symbolizes bad luck. “I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree” (Poe 6). The name Pluto comes from the god of the underworld, and symbolizes…
Some of the characteris that he uses to describe in this story are horrible death and terror and anger. Both of these describe the theme of gothic literature. The Black Cat represents horrible death because in the story the man kills a cat in a violent unnecessary fashion. He kills the cat and has no good explanation for killing it. “One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose around its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;” (Poe 7). This quote represents horrible death because of the way that he killed his cat and how he had no real reason on why it should have died. Also in the story The Black Cat, Poe shows the characteristic terror and anger. The way that he shows terror and anger in the story is when he killed his wife out of anger because she was trying to save the cat. He chose to kill her in a gruesome way that was out of anger. When he killed her he showed terror because of what he had done. “... I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot” (Poe 19). This quote shows terror and anger based on his actions that he took to kill his wife. Throughout the story The Black Cat, gothic literature is shown through the characteristics horrible death and terror and…
Another common theme between the two stories is struggle- trying to get out of a situation when you just cannot. In The Black Cat, the narrator tries to escape from the guilt of killing Pluto, but cannot, so he ends up killing his wife. He could not do anything to stop himself from behaving the way he did. This is extremely similar to The Fall of the House of Usher where Roderick Usher is trying to escape from the mental illness that he has. Asking his childhood friend to visit, he had hoped that it could help bring him out of his shell, maybe just miraculously cure him, but it does not. In the end, just like the narrator in The Black Cat, he ends up loosing something extremely precious- his life. Poe also uses Single Unifying Effect in both stories. Five examples of him using it in The Black Cat are: The voice from the tomb (the scream); the death of Pluto, his first cat; the ruining of his house; the murder of his wife and the image of the…
Pet owners love their pets, but never expect them to bring misfortune to them. In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and Edgar Allen Poe’s Black Cat we explore common themes of death through the owners cats. Both of these cats played a huge role resulting in the fate of their owners and the loved ones surrounded by them; they brought death and misfortune to them. They also share many similarities and differences we can find throughout each story. They differ between their importance to the story and are similar in representing death. Also both felines bring out characteristics of their owners that ultimately lead to their downfall. Both cats explore a common theme of death while sharing similarities and having their differences…