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"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe







              'The Black Cat' is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was born in 1809, died at the age of 40 in 1849, and was an important contributor to the American Romantic movement. His work has also been described as mystery, macabre, and Gothic.

             There are many supernatural elements in this story, such as references to apparitions, God, and inescapable acts. It is the latter that is the theme of the story and the strongest reference to unmentioned, unseen forces. This unmentioned force is a strongly believed Buddhist belief, called Karma. Belief in Karma implies that a person who commits good, just acts will be rewarded with better life conditions in their next incarnation. Unjust acts lead to worse conditions in their next life. This story deals with a modified version of that belief, and that is that horrid, unjust acts, like those committed by the narrator of the tale, cannot go unpunished forever. 

            Throughout the opening paragraph of “The Black Cat,” the reader is introduced to a narrator who, because of his grotesque actions, has become mentally deranged and very untrustworthy, ” . . . my very senses reject their own evidence.” The narration of this story is in the first person, which would lead you to believe the narrator could be trusted to relate to you the true events of the story, but this is false. The narrator in this story is unreliable due to his horrid state of mind and body. The narrator cannot be relied upon to show the reader the true events of the story, these events have to be interpreted and the reader must come to his own conclusion as to what really happened.

             The reader is shown in the opening paragraph that he should not trust the narrator to deliver the true events of the story. The narrator admits throughout the story that his bad habits, namely alcoholism, lead to his irrational state of mind. His alcoholism was the root of his downfall. While intoxicated, the narrator mutilated his favourite pet, Pluto, causing the cat to become terrified of his master. The alienation of his cat gave the narrator even more cause to become mentally unstable.

             The hanging of his cat shows how the narrator has become obsessed with doing evil things for the sake of their evilness. This evilness is linked to his alcoholism. The narrator was most-likely in a drunken state when he hung his cat, which only infuriated his temper. This separation of friends had a huge effect on the narrator’s deadly temper. His temper is such that anything that slightly annoyed him caused him to go into fits of rage.

             However, as this man sunk into the depths of alcoholism, he quickly became intolerant with everything around him, everything including his wife, and his faithful companion, Pluto, which was the cat’s name. He constantly maltreated each of the animals, all except Pluto, whom he left alone because of their early friendship. However, Pluto could not understand that his master had changed and continued to try to stay close to the man, further and further aggravating the man, and eventually driving the man to a fit of madness that caused him to drive his pen into Pluto’s eye, effectively removing the eye from the socket. The cat obviously avoided the man from then on, but the man was so aggravated that he hung Pluto in a near by garden. The man’s house was then burnt to the ground, and because of the actions of one of his neighbor’s, Pluto’s dead body ended up saving the man’s...


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