Narrative Situation In Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat
Narrative Situation in Edgar Allan Poe 's "The Black Cat" Edgar Allan Poe 's short story "The Black Cat," first published in 1843, only a few months after his most famous work "The Tell-Tale Heart," is a literary epitome of its time as it possesses main characteristics of Gothic literature such as a mysterious plot, gloomy atmosphere and the narrator building up an enigma to leave the reader alone with it (Zimmermann 14). Poe is considered "a highly conscientious craftsman in these matters" (Zimmermann 18), and as we will see in this essay, he is particularly a master of creating unreliability, which is indeed the most salient feature in "The Black Cat." This essay will demonstrate this by analysing the narrative technique emanating from the first passage based on Allrath 's as well as Booth 's notions of unreliability. Findings by various other authors having worked extensively with Poe will be involved in order to substantiate my arguments. The narrator begins his story by announcing what the reader is going to hear and why: For the most wild, yet most homely …show more content…
In addition, the focalization influences the degree of unreliability. In this very first paragraph, the narrator ponders about the following demonstration of events, originating in the urge to "unburthen his soul" and acknowledging that they had a traumatizing effect on him. (Gargano 180). In doing so, he allows us, the readers, to witness his explicit psychological reflections. Since throughout the story, the reader does not have any insight into other characters ' inner processes, we are dealing with fixed internal focalization. Therefore, the reader can only perceive through the eyes of the narrator. This becomes clear at another point in the story as well, when the "alone identifies [the cat] as such," in contrast to the neighbors who only notice a "singular and strange figure" (Amper 481). Since perception is always subjective, the reader cannot fully rely on the accuracy of
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