Rhetorical Analysis For The Black Cat

In the short story The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, the story revolves around a man on death row who is giving his confession to a murder. The story starts out as the narrator tells the readers that from a young age, he had always loved animals. He and his wife have many pets, the favorite of his being a large black cat called Pluto. The narrator and Pluto are very close and their friendship last for many years until the narrator becomes an alcoholic. One night after coming home completely intoxicated, he grabs his cat and in an effort to escape, Pluto bites him.

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.

Alcoholism can completely eradicate the human sense of right or wrong. ‘The Black Cat’ is a story of loss and murder that is focused on the nameless narrator and the terrible thing he does when intoxicated. The story is written by Edgar Allen Poe. How would it be to live the life of a man who let anger come over him and later on kills his cat Pluto, and his wife. This story is about the narrator’s flashbacks on the events that put him into jail and on his way to death.

Comparative essay between The Black Cat and The Cat from Hell Thos about comparing and contrasting between Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Stephen King’s “The Cat from Hell”. Both of the authors are greatly known for their gothic stories. This essay is also going to mention a lot of suspense techniques those two authors use and compare them. As you know, suspense is a technique use in English gothic literature to make the readers feel nervous about what is going to happen in the story itself.

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.

The story continues with an event that is unfortunately far more terrible and unexpected than the previous events. The narrator allows his increasing anger towards the second black cat to lead him to killing his wife. His temper and hatred that began with the second black cat eventually ended up impacted him and his wife. The narrator states, “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan” (Poe 5).

In the story, the narrator attacks and wounds his cat while he is extremely drunk. He is overcome with the ‘fiery demon of alcohol’, much like Poe became before he died. In short, Poe’s life was rather terrible, and it’s apparent that these dark events in his life stimulated his unique and creepy style of writing, which is what he’s famous

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

Early into the story the wife makes frequent allusion, “all black cats are witches in disguise” (Poe 1), which is a popular ancient notation. This tells the reader that they should be suspicious of Pluto because he could possibly be a witch. When the narrator introduces Pluto to the reader he writes “Pluto—this was the cats name” (Poe 1). In Roman mythology Pluto is the god of the underworld.

In the excerpt from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, rhetorical devices such as appeal to pathos, imagery, and simile helped create suspense when Christopher had found out about his undead mother. By creating suspense, it gives the reader a certain feeling of wanting to read more to figure out what would happen next.

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.

Edgar Allan Poe’s frightening gothic style poetry and short novels about fear, love, death and horror are prominent to Gothic Literature and explore madness through a nerve-recking angle. The incredible, malformed author, poet, editor and novelist is recognized for his famous classical pieces such as “The Raven”, “Berenice” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”, pieces of work that mystically yet magnificently awakens readers with a gloomy spirit. Awakening the subject of madness through written work was viewed as insane during Poe’s times. Yet Poe published some of the worlds most magnificently frightening pieces of literature throughout history. In the following essay I will examine and cautiously analyze

“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.”

“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.

The Black Cat is a short story that shares a tale of a man and his cat, Pluto. The man was once kind and loved animals, but due to a large intake of alcohol, he becomes aggressive towards not only his wife, but Pluto as well. The narrator explains his change of heart by saying, “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.”