Violence In Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat

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 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.

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.

For example, characters in books are named after him, movies are made based on some of his stories, and he is even portrayed as a character in popular television shows. In the A Series of Unfortunate Events series, written by Lemony Snicket, there is a character named Arthur Poe. He has a son named Edgar and a sister named Eleonora, referring to Poe’s short story, Eleonora. Also, a movie directed by Brad Anderson which was released in 2014 called Stoneheart Asylum, is based on Poe’s short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. One who has read the story, can watch the movie and find many parallels between the story and certain scenes.

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.

What gives the reader that feeling of being on the edge of their seat? Why would he want the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next? That is how the author expresses tension. The author does this by using literary devices. Edgar Allen Poe builds suspense in “The Black Cat” by using specific literary devices—foreshadowing, allusion, and slow pace.

The most astonishing thing was the “graven in bas-relief upon the white, the figure of a gigantic cat. The image was given with an accuracy truly marvelous. there was a rope around the animal’s neck” (Poe 14). This drawing was a way of how Pluto marked his territory and got revenge for how brutally and wretchedly he was beat and killed. with this fire so went the narrator;s other pets and his lifer’s savings.

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.

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

The narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.

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.

It would have just been an angry fat man who hated cats. Revenge is what moved the plot forward from that to the fat man’s death at the hands of Madame Phloi. To sum up, in “The Sin of Madame Phloi,” Madame Phloi dodging the fat man to make him fall out the window after Thapthim’s death shows that revenge is used in a way to move the plot

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.

Later the philosophy of the cats is told, and it is reveled that there is some unknown deity in the sky who once a year grants an extra life to a chosen cat.