Antisocial Personality Disorders In The Black Cat, By Edgar Allan Poe

In Poe’s The Black Cat the narrator, and main character, states his desire to “unburden” his “soul” before he is to be executed (435). The narrator informs the reader that he knows the story he is about to tell is “most wild” and because of this he does not “expect nor solicit belief” (Poe 435). The narrator is lying about his desire or as Amper points out, “His tale is a fabrication, by which he seeks to conceal the true nature of his crime, exactly as he sought in walling up his wife’s body to conceal the fact of the crime” (475). However, Amper’s belief that the narrator’s lie is simply to cover his crime is too simplistic a view. The narrator cannot help but to lie because the events of his story, even the story itself, show strong evidence that he has antisocial personality disorder. Antisocial personality disorder (APD) has nine “diagnostic criteria” with fifteen basic “complications” and thirteen basic “symptoms” (Diseases and Conditions). Though the only thing known about the narrator is this tale, he plainly shows that he meets somewhere between nine and eleven of the basic “symptoms”, seven of the “complications”, and seven “diagnostic criteria” (Diseases and Conditions). …show more content…
The narrator does not mention whether or not he showed signs of “conduct disorder” when he was a child and if he was able to keep a job and pay his bills (Diseases and Conditions). However, one of the benchmarks of APD the narrator meets, though he does not tell us outright, is his age. In his tale, the narrator admits that he married young but had been married for a few years before his troubles began. Knowing these details it is not a leap to see that the narrator meets the criteria of being at least eighteen years old. The rest of the diagnostic criteria the narrator either tells the reader or he makes it clear through his