Examples Of Allusions In The Black Cat

In Poe’s “The Black Cat”, the narrator mentioned that the wife made frequent allusion “which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise” (Poe). It is a superstitious belief that a black cat is a sign of bad omen, bad luck, witchcraft, death, etc. The man also named his cat Pluto, which means god of the underworld in Greek mythology. The man believes that the mishaps that happened to him was probably due to the superstitious belief of having a black cat. One night, the man came home drunk. The man tried to capture the cat because it was avoiding him, but the cat bit him causing a wound on his hand. The man narrates, “the fury of demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body, and a …show more content…
The man cut one of the cat’s eyes from its socket using a penknife. The man talks about how his old heart left and came the spirit of perverseness. He says, “this spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow” (Poe). One morning, he hung the cat on a tree. On the night of the day he killed the cat, this man’s whole house burned down. The man visited the ruins from the fire and noticed a wall that did not fall from the fire. The wall has an impression of the cat with a rope around his neck. He states, “When I first beheld this apparition—for I could scarcely regard it as less—my wonder and my terror were extreme” (Poe). Then one night in a den, he saw a black cat, as big as Pluto, but it has a white fur on the cat’s chest that forms the shape of a gallows. He also realized that the cat does not have one eye, just like Pluto. His hate for the cat intensifies, as the cat becomes more attached to him. He says, “the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the merest chimeras it would be possible to conceive” (Poe). Then one day, into the cellar of an old building, the cat followed the man and his wife down the steep stairs, nearly