The Black Cat

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…

said mind to fall into a state of madness. No one can ever be sure if what a madman is telling them is true, whether they are truly insane, hallucinatory, lying, or deliberately contracting a defense of homicidal mania for himself. Through "The Black Cat", Edgar Allan Poe presents the ability of the human mind to recognize its wrongful acts and the deterioration of the mind's capacity to identify without being able to prevent its decline. The unnamed narrator states that he knows what he does is…

When most people think of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, they think of his affinity for writing about death. Upon further examination of Poe’s works, one notices many more aspects of writing than just the theme of death. Poe is drawn to write about the mentality deranged. Throughout many of his works, Poe explores illness of the human mind. The narrator of Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” starts the short story in a state of mental distress that escalates to the point of hysteria that can only be due to…

In the black cat Edgar Allen Poe uses setting to make horror. The setting of a horror story is important. Horror stories can take place anywhere, somewhere like a haunted house, graveyard, or camp. In The Black Cat the setting is mostly his house. This shows that setting in The Black cat makes the story a horror story. Edgar Allen Poe uses anger in his story this creates the mood. In the story the character gets drunk and takes his anger out on the cat and then later his wife. The mood in this…

narrator in this novella savagely murdered his wife by penetrating her skull with a nearby axe. Before he committed the spine-chilling murder, the narrator's cat followed him down to the cellar, annoying him to his breaking point. When he was aiming the axe at his cat, ready to strike, his wife stopped him before he could do anything fatal to the cat. But soon after his wife laid a hand on him, in a fit of madness, the narrator exclaimed, “Goaded by the inference into a rage more than…

“The fury of a demon instantly possessed me,” (2005) the narrator explains directly before he details how he proceeding to stab his favorite cat in the eye. The reader is to understand from the retelling that this is a natural reaction. The purpose of telling this entire twisted and disturbing story of “The Black Cat” is help unburden the author of his guilt and to reveal “very natural causes and effects” (2005). Natural to whom? Likely someone who is exhibiting classic symptoms of borderline…

philosophers have mused over the primitive, yet complicated question: is human nature inherently good or evil? Authors of the gothic fiction genre seem to believe that humanity at its core is wicked. Two hair-raising short stories, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," comparatively use gothic fiction as a vehicle to disclose the perverse nature of humankind using women in distress, mystery, and the ambiance of the story. By featuring women in distress, these…

short story, The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, the Narrator would be known as a psychopath. A psychopath is a person that has a mental disorder like in the short story. Edgar Allen Poe is the type of author that writes a lot of gruesome stories about death and other nightmares. The Narrator is what I think of as, a psychopath. One psychopathic tendency from the short story is the only love the Narrator officially found was towards his pet animals. But then when he got a pet cat, Pluto, the…

Edgar Allan Poe “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of it’s eyes from the socket!” This came from the short story “The Black Cat” written by Edgar Allen Poe. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are very depressing and filled with grief because of all the death in his life. In most of Poe’s stories, the narrators wanted to solve a problem or have revenge, but they went about it in a violent way. People were killed and the…

Earth and you are sitting in a jail cell with a heavy burden on your chest that you can’t help but to think about. The world sees you as crazy, but you know you’re sane. How would you prove your innocence? In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat” this scenario is put to the test. In the story, the reader is introduced to an unnamed narrator who is writing about how he got to this low point. He blames most of his downfall on things that he thinks he has no control over such as alcohol.…