In Edgar Allan Poe's short tale, "The Black Cat,” many aspects of the story and gothic literature are expressed in its horrid murders, extreme mental states, and hidden-passage settings centering around the events of the narrator's brutal murder of his wife. In creating his Gothic, Poe uses these techniques, and moreover, manipulates the themes in the story in multiple ways to ultimately demonstrate a unique brand of gothic literature.
The wife’s gruesome murder is the story’s most central event and portrays a strong element of the classic gothics of Poe. The narrator’s irrationality is one of the first and most obvious points of the tale, yet it is not until his wife’s mutilation, that one truly sees just how twisted and bestial he is. The …show more content…
The tale begins with the narrator describing his younger self as a kind and charming man and “gives details (with unwitting ironic ramifications) of his early love for animals” (Prinsky). The narrator proclaims, early in the tale, that he is kind, moral, and overall mentally stable. And although he may have been a kind, generous man, he completely changes into a foul human being as the years progress. His emotions and impulses begin to influx more and more, as the “fury of a demon instantly possessed [him]” to the point that little provocation is required to set him into intense rage (Poe 1). To describe the cruel crimes he commits, Poe also uses specific words to indicate the mental state of the narrator, such as “ brain” (instead of skull) and “heart” (instead of chest), which “point to the narrator’s fatal deficiency of love and compassion” (Clemen). It is clear that the narrator, at this point, has lost all attachment to his wife, and the constant impersonal wording highlights his distancing of his once love. The protagonist is frequently suffering from extreme stages of emotions throughout the course of the story, with moments of sanity quickly turning into spouts of intense anger in which he harms any being (whether dog or wife) in his environment. His severe mood swings are signs of a mental imbalance in the narrator and suits the gothic characteristic of instability
The wife’s gruesome murder is the story’s most central event and portrays a strong element of the classic gothics of Poe. The narrator’s irrationality is one of the first and most obvious points of the tale, yet it is not until his wife’s mutilation, that one truly sees just how twisted and bestial he is. The …show more content…
The tale begins with the narrator describing his younger self as a kind and charming man and “gives details (with unwitting ironic ramifications) of his early love for animals” (Prinsky). The narrator proclaims, early in the tale, that he is kind, moral, and overall mentally stable. And although he may have been a kind, generous man, he completely changes into a foul human being as the years progress. His emotions and impulses begin to influx more and more, as the “fury of a demon instantly possessed [him]” to the point that little provocation is required to set him into intense rage (Poe 1). To describe the cruel crimes he commits, Poe also uses specific words to indicate the mental state of the narrator, such as “ brain” (instead of skull) and “heart” (instead of chest), which “point to the narrator’s fatal deficiency of love and compassion” (Clemen). It is clear that the narrator, at this point, has lost all attachment to his wife, and the constant impersonal wording highlights his distancing of his once love. The protagonist is frequently suffering from extreme stages of emotions throughout the course of the story, with moments of sanity quickly turning into spouts of intense anger in which he harms any being (whether dog or wife) in his environment. His severe mood swings are signs of a mental imbalance in the narrator and suits the gothic characteristic of instability