The Black Cat

A Glimpse Into the World of “The Black Cat” Those who have read any of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories know that most of them are full of suspense and mystery and that they efflict a feeling of horror and shock upon the reader. Poe studies the mind, and is conscious of the abnormalities of his narrators and he does not condone the intellectual expedient through which they strive, only too earnestly, to justify themselves. He enters the field of the starkly, almost clinically realistic investigation of men who, although they may feel uneasy about their mental states when their tension lets up, are too far gone to understand their mania, let alone to control it (Gargano 171). His stories usually have a horrible murder theme in which there is a obsessive narrator and they follow the development of the theme step by step with a realism that, barring with genius, might case a history from the twentieth-century psychiatry. This could not be presented more clearly than in “The Black Cat”. Those who may deny realism to Poe cannot be very familiar with our daily newspapers, which periodically carry true stories of murders committed under just abnormal psychological pressures as those described in “The Black Cat” (Buranelli 76). This story begins with the narrator ,who is about to be hung, confessing what he has done in some type of repention for his soul. The narrator step by step describes how he began drinking and then to neglect his dearly beloved cat and his wife. One day when he is maddened by the actions of the cat, he cuts out its eye and later kills the cat by hanging it. After his house burns down and he has lost all he owned he finds a new cat resembling all to well the first. One day while working with his wife in the cellar he is nearly tripped down the stairs by the cat, he then picks up an axe and tries to kill it but his swing is intercepted by his wife and he instead strikes her and kills

Cited: Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe: Second Edition. Boston: Twanyne Publishers, 1977. 76-77. Davidson, Edward H. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. 190. Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1972. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991 Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Ed. Martha Womack. n.page.online. Internet 29 July. 1998