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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
In a horror story called The Black Cat, written by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator drastically changes. In the beginning of the story, the narrator is docile. He loves animals so much that he has birds, goldfish, a dog, a small monkey, and a cat. His favorite of all the animals was the cat named Pluto. He was a large black cat, and was very smart.
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 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.”
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 narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.
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
“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 Raven,” he suggests that the eyes of the Raven symbolize his inner demons, claiming that they stare into his soul and compress his heart with the guilt he carries. This is evident when he describes the raven’s eyes as “fiery eyes [which had] now burned into my bosom’s core” (Poe 74). The eyes of the raven continually haunt the narrator throughout the poem, and since the poem is a projection of Poe’s emotions, it can be understood that Poe sees the eyes as a constant reminder of the burden of grief he has within himself. Similarly, in “The Black Cat,” the narrator of the story becomes angry with his cat, Pluto, and tears out one of his eyes while under the influence of alcohol. He eventually kills his cat, in a fit of rage, and then believes that the cat comes back to haunt him; He encounters a similar cat that bears a strange resemblance to Pluto.
“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.
In the Poem “The Black Cat” He says” But my disease grew upon me --for what disease is like Alcohol! --and at length, even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish --even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper”. (Poe 1)