BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH Biographical Approach is a form of literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature. As early as the nineteenth century, scholars considered literary texts against the background of the author’s biography. The Biographical Approach investigates the life of an author using primary texts, such as letters, diaries, and other documents, that might reveal the experience, thought, and feelings that led to the creation of a literary work. The goal was to find references to the author’s life, education and socio-cultural environment in a literary work. Ever since the French critic Roland Barthes announced the “death of the author” in 1968, …show more content…
It is a story about domestic violence and brutal murder. It’s the confession of nameless man who destroys himself, his wife, and his pets. The Black Cat tells about a man who loved his pet so much, but because the effect of alcoholism, he changed from a lover into a brutal man. He killed his pet named Pluto, the black cat. Edgar Allan Poe is known as an intriguing person, and has a popular reputation as a creepy man, some readers are tempted to imagine that Poe and his narrators are one in the same. Most of Poe’s works are gothic or dark-themed. This story might confuses the readers whether the narrator was Poe himself or just one of his characters. As far as people know, Poe was no murderer. He seemed to have loving relationship with his wife, and is reported to have been a cat lover. His habit who loved his wife or cat and popular opinion that say he was an alcoholic become the inspiration of “The Black Cat”. By analyzing this short story, we might be able to find answers or who is really the main character in the story, is it the narrator? Or is it Poe himself? EDGAR ALLAN …show more content…
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. He was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor. Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery and horror initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. He was an American writer, critic and editor but was best known for his poems and short stories. At a young age, Edgar grew up to rough circumstances. Poe’s mother was a teenage widow when she married David Poe, and Edgar was their second son. Poe’s father had a fairly good reputation as an actor, but he had an even wider reputation as an alcoholic.
Death, love, darkness, betrayal, greed, and cruelty are all themes that Edgar Allen Poe use in his stories. He uses these themes with different settings and characters, which all relate. The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat are two of Poe’s stories that have different settings and characters but have the same themes. Edgar Allen Poe was a nineteenth century author who wrote stories. His stories were full of mystery, suspense and horror.
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston Massachusetts. Poe's father left the household early on, and his mother died when he was three. Poe moved to Richmond, Virginia to live with John and Frances Allan. Poe was faced with some financial problems, and when he went to attend the University of Virginia he was not able to receive a sufficient amount of funds in order to pay tuition. This lead Poe to turn to gambling to pay the rest of the costs, but this only landed him in debt.
Many classic stories were published during his lifetime as well, thus leading to some possible inspiration for his works. When Poe was nineteen years old, the first U.S. railroad was created. His twenties were when many historical events
“Lord help my poor soul.” These were the last words uttered by a delirious Edgar Allan Poe on the night of his death on October 3, 1849, wearing another man’s clothes. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Poe’s death and his tragic life reflect his often morbid, macabre, and bitter works. It is often speculated that the death of every woman in Poe’s life due to consumption, leaving him to believe he was cursed, along with his financial failures (though he did have literary success during his lifetime), may have left him unhinged. Two comparable short stories written by Poe are “The Black Cat” and “The Masque of the Red Death.”
Next, Poe develops suspense in the black cat through the hanging of Pluto. The narrator is unbalanced and insane, yet hangs Pluto with full intent by the limb of a tree. The narrator states, Quote 1 “hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes with the bitterest remorse at my heart” (Poe 2). The violence that the narrator displays with the hanging of Pluto enroots anxiety for the perusal to know.
“Pluto – this was the cat’s name – was my favorite pet and playmate” (Poe 520). This man is more violent and he hangs and burns that cat he adored. The narrator is not so lucky though, because another black cat follows and haunts him on his way home. This cat also drives him crazy and he tries to kill the cat but ends up killing his wife instead. The narrator buries his wife in the wall and when the police come looking for her body, the cat helps them find her corpse.
In the gruesome short story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe a nameless narrator tells his story of his drunken and moody life before he gets hung the next day. The intoxicated narrator kills his favorite cat, Pluto and his wife with an axe. Soon enough, the narrator gets caught and there he ends up, in jail. Although, most readers of “The Black Cat” have argued the narrators insanity, more evidence have shown that he is just a moody alcoholic with a lousy temper.
In Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, the narrators both reveal their crimes to the police through over-confidence and guilt. Both unreliable, you cannot always believe what they say. The narrators’ arrogance and guilt allow then to reveal their crimes to the police and their true evil selves to the world. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator kills his wife out of anger for the second cat. While she is protecting the cat, he takes an ax to her brain.
Also, when reading “ The Black Cat”, Poe will not keep the reader up-to-date with the natural world. He likes to keep his readers guessing. This alone makes the narrator unreliable. When the Black Cat came back after the narrator killed it, both he and the reader were very shocked.
In these two stories Poe uses foreshadowing in way that if the reader spots the small details or Poes “word playing “ he/she can predict what will happen or get a hint of what will happen. In Black Cat there are few foreshadows. One foreshadow is when the narrator sees a cat in the wall and Pluto`s color being black is believed to be unlucky and in this story the narrator is unhappy and unlucky. The narrator gets gouth because of a cat being inside a wall.
Edgar Allan Poe addresses the dark and gruesome side of human nature in his writing “The Black Cat”, which during that time and even now are perceived as radical ideas. This dark human nature is displayed in Poe’s writing as the narrator recalls the happenings of a most erratic event. The narrator, a pet lover with a sweet disposition, in this story succumbs to the most challenging aspects of human nature including that of addiction, anger, and perverseness. To the Christian believer, human’s sinful flesh leads people to do wrong because that is their natural tendency.
The narrator of “The Black Cat” is an alcoholic. By mistreating his pets and wife, he demonstrates how his addiction affects him. Alcoholism itself is an act of insanity because alcoholics see things in an entirely different manner than sober people. The narrator had a sufficient childhood and had a great deal of pets. Once he grew addicted
However, Edgar Allan Poe’s famous morose outlook on the world did not come out of thin air. In fact, his life was riddled with disasters and mishappenings. Poe was born on January 19, 1809, to two professional actors who tragically died before he reached three. He excelled academically, and his life seemed to be going up, but was kicked out of his university due to some gambling debts, so he enlisted in the army.
This essay will be focusing on the world where his story “The Black Cat” takes place. This world of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” is unnatural, with heavy themes of violence. Characters in this world behave unnaturally with violence and cruelty, and murder is commonplace. “The Black Cat”" starts off a man who loves his black cat Pluto. Though he loves Pluto he begin starts to have outbursts due to alcoholism.