Examples Of Perverseness In The Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe is a man known for his uncomfortable, devious stories of murder, and “The Black Cat” is no exception. This short story portrays how a narrator transforms from a caring husband and pet owner to a fiendish madman. The narrator’s superego, his ego, and his id are completely problematic. The narrator knows that what he did was wrong. This was demonstrated by his guilt and his attempt to contain himself by putting the second cat in the same fate as Pluto.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat , he writes a cold, heartless story from an unnamed narrator’s point of view. The Black Cat is about the narrator’s current life which he claims to be sane, but throughout the story it is clear he is not. The story focuses on the narrator’s alcohol abuse and how it causes him to have mood swings and violent out lashes to his pets to the point of killing them.

Many authors or poets use this theme to depict how past experiences or events affects people mentally and can leave them demented in many cases. “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe encompasses this theme. While searching for answers from the raven, “respite the nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore” (Poe 439) the man cannot get over the loss of his wife causing psychological issues for the man such as trying to obtain info from a raven about his dead wife. Correspondingly, in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, the man becomes agitated with the cat and decides to hang it. He “hung it because (he) knew in doing so (he) was committing a sin” (Poe 2).

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is a short, horror story. The narrator, who is sentenced to death, reflects on his life and the decent of his character from young boy to murderer. He describes himself as growing up a mild, young sensitive boy. He marries young and introduces his wife to his love of pets. Ultimately the narrator begins drinking too much and becomes an alcoholic.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer in the 1800’s that contrasted hatred and love in his stories. The stories all share similar qualities, the ideas of belonging, love and murder. The elements of the plot focus on the contrast of sanity and insanity that has come from an overwhelming amount of obsession. In the stories the characters have somewhat regret for their destructive deeds previously, but return to madness and obsession even after bereaving for their victims. Edgar Allen Poe’s stories are his expressions of what obsession and addiction can be explained through the decay that comes amidst obsession and also with the destruction of another.

For example, after the narrator gouges his cat's eye out, the cat becomes petrified of him. As a result the narrator ". . .slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree" (Poe 9). The narrator's reasoning for this was his incessant drinking and short temperament, although that is hardly an excuse. Later on in the story, the narrator finds another cat, who he also attempts to kill for no good reason.

Poe is known for his spine chilling stories of which all have the same genre of horror. Both of Poe’s stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, display a person with a psychotic personality. In both of these stories the narrator let’s his aggravations get the best of him and persuade him to kill. Both narrators kill someone they love because of their insane thoughts. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator loves the old man and doesn’t want to kill him but believes that he has to because of the old man’s evil eye.

In the end, the eye has its revenge. In “The Black Cat,” a man’s love for animals eventually turns into a cold-blooded murder. In the two short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe spins two unique murder tales of madness, arrogance, and love.

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.

A simile is a comparison that describes two different things using ¨like¨ or ¨as.¨ The first way Connell demonstrates using a simile is in the example, ¨The sea was as flat as a plate glass window.¨ He describes the sea to a smooth glass window. During this part of the story, there was no breeze in the air and the ocean waves were still and calm, which caused Rainsford to feel stressed about the strange things that were happening around the island. Another way Connell used a simile was ¨... his thick eyebrows were pointed and military mustache was as black as the night from which Rainsford had come.¨

The author writes, “The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them.” (Poe, 1843) This text describes that the killer has a mental disorder. Poe also writes, “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, “dissemble no more” I admit the deed! - tear up the planks - here, here!

One example of a simile in the story was, “It was perfumed and gave off a smell like incense. ”“Connell 5”The author used this phase to put you in the place of Rainsford, use one of his five sense to better understand what he is going through at this point in the story. You get to know what he is smelling since they used a scent that most people know. This is also why it helped me the most since it was a familiar scent. If someone uses a reference that isn't as relatable or is hard to imagine then it will not be as helpful to the reader.

The following night after the narrator kills the cat, the house catches on fire and the next day the narrator comes back to the house to see the ruins and came to see a group of people around a strange bas relief on the wall. The narrator was terrified when he saw what the bas relief was and the narrator writes, “There had been a rope about the animal’s neck” (Poe 3).

The story expressed the depiction of a slow, torture infused death through the hanging of the cat in “The Black Cat.” Poe Expresses the death of his cat in the following quote“ One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — Hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me.” The use of terror, furthermore, exemplifies the vision of horror in short stories which helped the authors of the future when expressing the pain of a

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.