The Black Cat Tone

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for captivating readers with his intense and suspenseful poems and short stories. Fiction lovers all over the world are mesmerized by the way Poe is able to capture his audience’s attention and make them feel entrapped in his world of literature with every word. Poe is able to have this impact on his readers by using a variety of literary tools. In “The Black Cat” and “The Spectacles” Edgar Allan Poe uses tone, imagery, and point-of-view to create a universal theme that fills readers with suspense and leaves them craving more.

In both “The Spectacles” and “The Black Cat” Poe uses tone to allow the readers to feel as he felt. We see the use of tone in Poe’s story “The Black Cat” when he writes, “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; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.” This use of tone allows the reader to experience the guilt that the narrator is feeling. When the reader can sense what the character is feeling and feel the emotion along with them, it bonds the reader to the story. This is one thing that sets Poe’s work apart from other authors and makes his …show more content…
One of the many times we see tone in “The Spectacles” is when the narrator says, “I saw- I felt- I knew that I was deeply, madly, irrevocably in love- and this even before seeing the face of the person beloved”. This use of tone allows the reader to understand how in love the narrator is with his mystery women. It is crucial to the development of the story that the reader understand the feelings of the narrator at every point in the story. By Poe showing the reader how the narrator feels when he sees this woman, it allows the reader to develop a solid understanding of the