“Sometimes a man’s mind makes him see strange sights. What he sees can make him do terrible things to those too weak to resist. But in the end, sometimes the weak get revenge.”- Edgar Allan Poe. When People read this story they might think that Poe is actually crazy. Poe wrote his stories like he lived them. “The Black Cat,” written by Edgar Allan Poe, had a large amount of symbolism and foreshadowing to help the story be explained.
The narrator has always, from a young age loved animals. He and his wife had many pets, he became very fond of the black cat named Pluto. Pluto and the narrator loved each other equally. The narrator started drinking, he slowly started drinking alcohol more and more each day. He was an alcoholic and became abusive physically and mentally. One night he was intoxicated, thought the cat was neglecting him, and gouged Pluto's eye out. More days pass and the narrator is getting worse, he gets so mad he hangs Pluto from a tree. The narrator's wife stays with him, being an understanding wife but slowly he becomes crazier. A new cat comes, He kills his wife with an ax, and the new cat uncovers the body for the police. The narrator is to die the next day.
Symbolism was used many times throughout “The Black Cat.” Symbolism is a poetic style using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to explain ideas,
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The crazy plot line and description of the horrible happenings in the story make you want to read more about this greatly expressed story with foreshadowing and symbolism. The quotes of horrifying words going through this sick man's brain makes you wonder if people are actually like that. Poe was an amazing writer who knew how to spook and keep the reader reading at the same time. I love the way he wrote the stories, especially “The Black Cat” I didn’t to stop reading. I definitely recommend this writer and the story “The Black
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.”
Edgar Allen Poe is a true genius in the writing world. He uses an abundance of literary skills and rich vocabulary to make a strong story that keeps people engaged. Edgar Allen Poe is the author of the three stories, “Tell Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, and “The Cask of Amontillado”. All of these stories are similar because of Poe’s literary consistency and strong vocabulary. Poe’s writing is unusual.
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.
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.
“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.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” vs. “The Black Cat” “I was never insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” This quote from Edgar Allan Poe portrays the plot in both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” precisely. Both of these tales bring you into the mind of two fascinating narrators. These ghastly short stories written by Poe in the 1840’s are quite different, but they share striking similarities. “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are similar in several ways.
Alcohol is a noteworthy theme throughout Edgar Allan Poe’s writing. This may be because of Poe’s struggle with alcoholism. There are two prominent stories Poe has written with strong themes of alcoholism. These stories are the “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Black Cat”. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, alcohol plays a large role in the story.
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.
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
Most of the narrations like in "The Black Cat" give a sense of irrationality. Hatred, melancholy, woe and distress, his characters rely more on the human side showing their mental state, taking his stories to have a bigger impact on the reader’s minds. This is attributed to the period where his works were written, as stated earlier. Poe’s usage of resources like dark atmospheres, messing around with the time in which the story is represented, this was most commonly used to alter reader’s ideas of the perfection and the beauty and divert them more to the contemporary side. He liked to mix different settings with times who were most likely to confuse the reader’s perception of it, making his stories more suspenseful.
His alcoholism causes him to be abusive and eventually leads him cutting Pluto’s eye out and hanging him. The same night of Pluto’s hanging, the man’s house burns down, where he sees the impression of a giant cat with a noose around his neck on one of the walls of the burnt house. Eventually he gets another black cat with some white fur. He starts to hate this cat, so he also kills it.