The Black Cat It is evident that the narrator is haunted by a supernatural force. The becoming of the narrator’s insanity is from alcohol. The cat, however, is the supernatural force that is present in the story. Although many people believe otherwise, there are more pieces of the story that prove the supernatural. The cat has always been thought of a witch. The narrator stated about his wife, “in speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition… which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.” The narrator, on the other hand, is pretty strange. He lives a good childhood with many pets. This brings him to love pets more that humans. He gets happily married to his wife and lives with many pets. As the narrator said, “I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets.” One of which is an all-black cat named Pluto. The narrator loved this cat more than and pet he owned and his own wife. Then he began to drink alcohol. This is the part that breaks the story into the supernatural. The narrator doesn’t begin to go insane until he drinks alcohol. Then, the uprising occurs. …show more content…
The narrator comes home intoxicated every night and wildly exploit his pets. After a while, this goes further to the beating of his wife. He beats his wife without a care, without a thought. Then, the craziest thing you can imagine… he beats the one he loves more than any soul in the world. Pluto. Not only beats, but cuts on of his eyes. He describes in the story,” I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from its socket!” Not because he was intoxicated though, but because the cat dug his teeth into the human’s
Black cats are associated with Halloween, but never disappear after the holiday is over. They are known as mysterious, almost creepy, creatures. Black cats can signify back luck or evil. They roam the night, observing the world with their glowing eyes. They have been associated with witches for a long time, being thought of as their animal familiars or the reincarnation of a witch.
The cat becomes a symbol of the narrator's self-imposed imprisonment, and as the story progresses, his confinement becomes more and more
The tale, “The Cat and The Mice,” is an old Tibetan folktale that can be likened to Tom and Jerry, a cat and mouse battle, each trying to thwart the other. “The Cat and The Mice” has two common elements of a folktale, an obstacle that the characters have to overcome and animals exhibiting human attributes. Both of the two sides,the cat and the mice, of this story face an obstacle. The story begins with the cat embracing his age, “But as time passed, she found that she was growing old and infirm and that it was becoming more difficult for her to catch the same number of mice as before. “ The cat, in her advancing age was no longer able to feed herself at the same frequency as she had become accustomed to.
The narrator’s feeling after abusing the cat is remorse and irritation. This is significant because it allows the audience to understand the narrator still cares for Pluto. Every time the main character does something despicable to his cat, he feels melancholy. As a result, this shows there is still some innocence and love left in the main character. He is not entirely influenced by the alcohol yet.
It is also an unusual situation, because in the story, after he hanged the cat and went to sleep, his house suddenly burns out of nowhere (“I was aroused…” | Paragraph 10), and the members of the household, including the man, successfully escaped, and pluto, the cat he hanged, has resurrected into another black cat (“It was a black
Edgar Allan Poe once said, “Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” It is until reading one of Poe’s works that one begins to question the mind of Poe and his characters. Especially in stories such as “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, it takes an extremely deranged mind to write in the detail and ideology as he did. In the short story, “The Black Cat”, the narrator tells his story of a cat he cherished. After a fateful night of drinking, he comes home and attacks his wife and cat, resulting in the cat losing its eye.
“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.
[Eventually when] the cat followed me [the main character]…, [it] exasperated me [him] to madness. I [he attempted to] aim a blow [with an axe] at the animal… Goaded, by the interference [of his wife], into a rage more than demoniacal, I [he] withdrew my [his] arm from her [his wife’s] grasp and buried the axe in her [narrator’s wife’s] brain (Poe, page 4).” Because the narrator was annoyed and infuriated, he kills his wife, as well, for interfering with his plan to kill the second cat they adopted; thus this shows the main character’s corrupted and malicious mind. The former joyful, generous man sprouts into an evil and a criminal, who murders Pluto, his cat, and his wife.
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.
Have I gone Mad? Madness can be defined as: a state of severe mental illness (Webster n.p.). This can involve behavior or thinking that is quite foolish and dangerous. That being stated, both the main characters in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” are perceived to be mad in their own personal traits. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator murders the old man that he resides with because he is troubled by the man’s vulture eye.
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.
The narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.
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
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.