Gothic stories are littered with gruesome descriptions because their stories are meant to inflict horror in the reader. In this story, these descriptions include the narrator's thoughts as well as when he is doing something that would be disturbing to most readers.
The first example of the gothic element, grotesque, would be when the narrator kills Pluto. One night, after returning home drunk, the narrator grasps the cat by its throat and with a pen knife, cut out one of its eyes. “When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty” (Poe 2). The cat's eye socket heals, but Pluto and the narrator no longer have a good relationship. Pluto starts to avoid the narrator all the time. Instead of feeling remorseful, the narrator just feels irritated at the cat's behavior. Suddenly one morning, he slipped a noose around the neck of …show more content…
After the cat goes missing for four days, the police arrive unexpectedly.The narrator is delighted in the fact that he has so cleverly and so completely concealed his horrible crime that he welcomes an inspection of the premises. However, here, in an act of insane bravado, he raps so heavily upon the bricks that entomb his wife, that to his abject terror, a voice from within the tomb answered. At first, it was a muffled and broken cry, but then it swelled into an "utterly anomalous and inhuman howl a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell” (Poe 5). Upon tearing down the wall on which the narrator has rapped, the police discover the decayed remains of the woman and the black cat whom the narrator describes “with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the
The first example of the gothic element, grotesque, would be when the narrator kills Pluto. One night, after returning home drunk, the narrator grasps the cat by its throat and with a pen knife, cut out one of its eyes. “When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty” (Poe 2). The cat's eye socket heals, but Pluto and the narrator no longer have a good relationship. Pluto starts to avoid the narrator all the time. Instead of feeling remorseful, the narrator just feels irritated at the cat's behavior. Suddenly one morning, he slipped a noose around the neck of …show more content…
After the cat goes missing for four days, the police arrive unexpectedly.The narrator is delighted in the fact that he has so cleverly and so completely concealed his horrible crime that he welcomes an inspection of the premises. However, here, in an act of insane bravado, he raps so heavily upon the bricks that entomb his wife, that to his abject terror, a voice from within the tomb answered. At first, it was a muffled and broken cry, but then it swelled into an "utterly anomalous and inhuman howl a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell” (Poe 5). Upon tearing down the wall on which the narrator has rapped, the police discover the decayed remains of the woman and the black cat whom the narrator describes “with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the