The Black Cat Insanity Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. He was an American writer, critic and editor but was best known for his poems and short stories. At a young age, Edgar grew up to rough circumstances. Poe’s mother was a teenage widow when she married David Poe, and Edgar was their second son. Poe’s father had a fairly good reputation as an actor, but he had an even wider reputation as an alcoholic. He abandoned the family a year after Poe was born, and the following year, Poe’s mother died while she was acting in Richmond, Virginia. The children were separated, and Poe was taken in as a foster child by John Allan.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the tone gives off an eerie and bizarre feeling. This is similar to many of Poe’s other short stories but this piece the most. The tone is gloomy compared to “The Black Cat” that Poe has also written. The author starts off the story with immense details of the setting. The readers get a dark vibe from these details.

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.

Why do people choose to go into haunted houses? It is because they want to know what happens inside. Haunted houses maintain this mystery and intrigue in order to create an element of suspense. Edgar Allan Poe uses this same element in “The Black Cat” to keep the reader interested. Poe develops suspense through three events: the hanging of his black cat, Pluto; the finding of the second black cat; and the killing of his wife, Virginia.

“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.

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”.

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 a witch. The narrator stated, “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.” Intelligent he was, giving karma to the narrator.

While Edgar Allan Poe as the narrator of the The Tell-Tale Heart has the reader believe that he was indeed sane, his thoughts and actions throughout the story would prove otherwise. As the short story unfolds, we see the narrator as a man divided between his love for the old man and his obsession with the old man’s eye. The eye repeatedly becomes the narrator’s pretext for his actions, and while his delusional state caused him much aggravation, he also revealed signs of a conscience.

Edgar Allan Poe 's The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart are very similar in the way that they portray insanity. In The Black Cat the narrator was an introvert that becomes an alcoholic and becomes “insane” when he starts to not feel any emotions when he does anything, cruel or not. In The Black Cat the narrator did things that many would consider insane, such as taking a cats’ eye out or hanging the cat because you love it. The narrator, despite being an alcoholic, did things that even if you were intoxicated would make you insane to be ok with. The narrator, in a drunken stupor, took the black cats’ eye out, then afterwards, after feeling some remorse at least, decided to hang the cat because he loved it. The narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.

Evil feeds on arrogance. The main character, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” was self-absorbed. Prince Prospero’s frailty is his arrogance. While the rest of the world was fending to survive an atrocious pestilence, Prince Prospero locked up the gates of his abbey; then, he remarked, “The external world can fend for itself (Poe, page 373).” “In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death (Poe, page. 373)” Thus, the prince’s arrogance caused him to believe he was truly able to escape the Red

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.

James Gargano believes the black cat of Poe’s short story is a direct analogue to the narrator, with inclinations for both good and evil. However, Jungian psychology reveals the cat as a function of the narrator’s anima. Jung argues that instinct, like a cat, commands a wider range of perceptions because it relies on irrational impulses. As the cat grows intolerable, Jung argues that the narrator’s subconscious begins to express itself through abusive acts toward the wife and cat in order to gain control over his anima. The narrator tries to remove his anima through the hanging the cat; however, failure is shown in the cat’s reappearance. Continued repression of the narrator’s anima causes his impulses toward it to become stronger. His impulses

To properly determine whether or not the narrator in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” is insane a definition of insanity must be brought to light; possible explanations for his transgression must be examined, and the scope of information that has been provided must be understood for what it is.

An author has the freedom to create their own worlds. Some are realistic worlds with a dark twist, others are just complete nonsense. What if the world of an author came to life? Specifically, how would the World of Edgar Allen Poe be? Most of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories have a similar theme. 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.

So “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, uses a significant amount of literary devices such as symbolism, suspense, foreshadowing. Poe added a lot of suspense in the story, such as unusual characters, because the man who owned Pluto is a drunk owner, which is strange and normally doesn’t appear in gothic stories (“One night, returning home, much intoxicated” | Paragraph 7). 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