The Black Cat This short story by Edgar Allan Poe tells the story of a man that, having been condemned to be hanged due to the murder of his wife, tries to explain on the night before his execution his side of the story about the circumstances that led him to his terrible destiny.
“For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul..”(137)
He starts by clarifying that he was once a kind and benevolent person, with a wife hat loved him and a mini menagerie of pets in his possession. …show more content…
My source titled, “Untold story: the lying narrator in the Black cat” By Susan Amper, discus the theory that the narrator is deceiving us. She points out a lot of incongruences in the narrator story that indicate the falsehood of his tale and claims that the entire story is false. In her eyes the narrator tries to deceive us so that he convince us of his innocence, and that his cations were the result of supernatural elements beyond his control. First, to prove her point she cites the murder of his wife as our best guest to find the truth. Since the narrator claims he killed her and hide her body in the same day, it raises questions. “This description, and particularly the references to "one period" and "another," suggest that considerable time passes between the murder and the entombment in the basement wall. The reader is therefore surprised to discover that the entombment is in fact concluded on the same day as the incident on the stairs (858).” (Amper, 477) I must admit, that she makes a good point and that the murder of the narrator’s wife seems premeditated when analogizing these …show more content…
He is certainly deceiving us when he recalls the details of the murder of his wife, but one could ask him or herself: Is he really wishes to prove his innocence to a hypothetical audience, why invent something as far-fetched as a supernatural cat to blame? Why not claim that, maybe he killed his wife in self-defense or in a complete accident, and fearful that no one would believe him, he hide her body? In my point of view, that would have been probably sounder to a reasonable person that wishes to be remembered as an innocent but misguided man. But, our narrator is probably not a reasonable or sane person, at least to me. I think that he reason why he tells us the story of the cat is probably because to some extent he believes it, he believes that Pluto came back to haunt him and take revenge on him. As we have seen, he was a man plagued by drinking and to some degree by the guilt of his actions against his loved ones. All of these elements combined could have taken a toll on his sanity, or maybe he already had a prone to craziness before, we do not know. The reason I believe this is because insane person do not believe in the falsehood of their delusions, and would claim and swear constantly that the things they believe and see are real. To me that’s probably one of the main reasons why he writes this story: to prove that his delusions were real and share a part of his
“For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul..”(137)
He starts by clarifying that he was once a kind and benevolent person, with a wife hat loved him and a mini menagerie of pets in his possession. …show more content…
My source titled, “Untold story: the lying narrator in the Black cat” By Susan Amper, discus the theory that the narrator is deceiving us. She points out a lot of incongruences in the narrator story that indicate the falsehood of his tale and claims that the entire story is false. In her eyes the narrator tries to deceive us so that he convince us of his innocence, and that his cations were the result of supernatural elements beyond his control. First, to prove her point she cites the murder of his wife as our best guest to find the truth. Since the narrator claims he killed her and hide her body in the same day, it raises questions. “This description, and particularly the references to "one period" and "another," suggest that considerable time passes between the murder and the entombment in the basement wall. The reader is therefore surprised to discover that the entombment is in fact concluded on the same day as the incident on the stairs (858).” (Amper, 477) I must admit, that she makes a good point and that the murder of the narrator’s wife seems premeditated when analogizing these …show more content…
He is certainly deceiving us when he recalls the details of the murder of his wife, but one could ask him or herself: Is he really wishes to prove his innocence to a hypothetical audience, why invent something as far-fetched as a supernatural cat to blame? Why not claim that, maybe he killed his wife in self-defense or in a complete accident, and fearful that no one would believe him, he hide her body? In my point of view, that would have been probably sounder to a reasonable person that wishes to be remembered as an innocent but misguided man. But, our narrator is probably not a reasonable or sane person, at least to me. I think that he reason why he tells us the story of the cat is probably because to some extent he believes it, he believes that Pluto came back to haunt him and take revenge on him. As we have seen, he was a man plagued by drinking and to some degree by the guilt of his actions against his loved ones. All of these elements combined could have taken a toll on his sanity, or maybe he already had a prone to craziness before, we do not know. The reason I believe this is because insane person do not believe in the falsehood of their delusions, and would claim and swear constantly that the things they believe and see are real. To me that’s probably one of the main reasons why he writes this story: to prove that his delusions were real and share a part of his