Preview

What Is Poe's Response To The Black Cat

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
361 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is Poe's Response To The Black Cat
Poe’s “The Black Cat” Short Response

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” can be considered a horror story as well as a study in human psychology. The horrors of the violent acts committed by the narrator are explained as the story progresses as is the demise of his mental state. As he describes himself in the opening of the story as a lover of animals, it is shocking to later read of his first act of violence toward his cat, the gouging out of his eye. Although the narrator appears to show some remorse, shame, and guilt over this act on the cat he is able to drown it all out with the continued consumption of alcohol. It is apparent that the excessive use of alcohol started him on the path of perverseness and unable to handle the guilt

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    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."…

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    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…

    • 908 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe , his stories characterized by mystery and macabre. That what encouraged me to choose one of his stories.…

    • 246 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The Black Cat” is narrated by a man on the day before he is to be put to death for the crime of murdering his wife. He can be considered an unreliable narrator. This is because his deeds do not match his words. He states, “From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition” and “I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets” (514). He then gouges the eye out and later kills the family pet, a cat, in cold blood by hanging it from a tree. He states that he is not mad. Yet he commits the deeds of a madman. The narrator uses flashback in his description of the events leading up to his execution. Poe uses foreshadowing to hint or give clues of future events. Some of his use of foreshadowing is subtle. At other times it is more obvious.…

    • 671 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The cause of the conflict in the story “The Black Cat” is lack of respect of morals. The narrator’s behavior was affected by his weakness, which is alcohol. The addiction to alcohol start to make him think of horrific thoughts, thus he began to act upon them. Poe wrote, “This spirt of perverseness came to my final overthrow” (par. 10).…

    • 365 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dreamed before” (Edgar Allan Poe). Deep sadness, darkness and tragedy are all characteristics that can be used to describe Poe’s writings. Painful tragedies, such as the abandonment of his father, the death of his biological mother, the death of his adoptive mother and the death of his young wife Virginia were very important factors in shaping Poe’s style of writings and his development of the horror genera. Those tragedies came to shape more than just his writings, but his life as well. Poe is popularly referred to as an avid drinker as well as a habitual opium user. The tragedies Poe has faced in his life lead him to self-medicate by the means of alcohol, which in turn became the death of him, but his thought to be an opium user purely derives from his fictional writings.…

    • 317 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 656 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator acts violently towards his cat for no particular reason. Although the narrator doesn’t state why, he always seems to be drawn to the cat’s eye in a negative way. The first incident in which the narrator abuses the cat is when it doesn’t react to his rage and looks into his eyes without fear. The narrator is extremely disturbed by the cat’s presence and deliberately tries to cut out its eye. “I fancied that the cat avoided my presence…I took from my waist-coat…

    • 839 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The narrators madness is ultimately conveyed through his unrealistic rational to kill the old man because of his opposition toward his eye. Similarly, another one of Poe’s stories, The Black Cat, lacks logic and reason, conveying the narrator’s madness, where the narrator kills his cat that he claims to love. In both the stories, the narrators commit atrocious crimes towards objects they love, without a normal motive to do so. As they both try to convince the reader of their sanity, they are ultimately conveyed as mad due to their lack of logic and…

    • 898 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the short story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator commits several terrible crimes. He is writing from a prison cell before he will be hung. He is an alcoholic who loves animals but during a drunken rage he harms his cat and then when he is sober again he kills it. He gets another cat, and he tries to kill it but he kills his wife instead. The police find her body and he is arrested for murder. But, the narrator is insane and cannot control his actions due to alcohol, grief, and a possible mental illness, so he is not guilty.…

    • 605 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mistakes In The Black Cat

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The reason is because the cat is black which means bad luck. The cat’s name is Pluto and in Greek mythology Pluto is the God of the underworld. .The drinking claim is stronger than the claim of the cat. In the story Poe talks more about the narrator’s drinking, and gives more to do with the drinking than the cat. He talks about the how when he drinks he is more of a different person than when he is silber.…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poe's use of characterization in the stories ‘The Black Cat”, “the Tell-Tail Heart”, and “The Cask of Amontillado”, allow Poe to demonstrate the madness that his characters typically go through. For example in “the Tell-Tale Heart” on page one Poe writes, “True!--…

    • 823 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    This article discusses the comparison of the eye in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart,” and how it relates to ego. Another comparison is also made to his similar short story “The Black Cat.” The writer states, “In "The Black Cat" the narrator arbitrarily sees that the black cat is bad and kills it, but the police 's questioning eye agitates and excites the narrator. The narrator feels compelled to reveal the truth, though he blames the cat rather than himself for his misconduct.”(2008) The author of the article goes on to discuss into depth into the evil that eye possesses, and makes the reader aware that most of Poe’s stories follow a similar format.…

    • 309 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Paranoia, Unaccountability, and Drunkenness : The Black Cat “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” -Edgar Allen Poe In his story “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allen Poe acquaints us to a death row inmate who, believing he was bewitched by at cat, wishes to find “... some intellect more calm, more logical... which will perceive (his circumstances) nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects” (1).…

    • 588 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays