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Violence In Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat

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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. “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. 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. The same cat thought to be dead then sells out the man to the police for killing his wife by drawing the police to the location in which his Wife was buried. This world is unnatural. For instance, when the man’s house …show more content…

In this story, it is implied that the black cat he had killed was getting his revenge upon him from, despite being dead. For instance, the day that he killed the black cat his house burnt down. This seems to not be any coincidence, as the image of the dead cat with a noose around his neck is marked onto one of the walls. The Cat also takes revenge in the form of the man’s second cat. The second cat slowly makes the man grow more and more insane. This led him to swinging an axe at the cat. He missed this however and accidentally killed his

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Here he reflects upon his childhood of a cat and the story drastically changes to where he kills this cat. The inspiration of his cat leads to mental unsteadiness to where he kills his wife in the end. " Sat, the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder" (Poe 14). The power of government establishes the laws. Therefore he had broken them when commuting murder to his cat for animal abuse, and first degree murder for his wife.

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For example, after the narrator gouges his cat's eye out, the cat becomes petrified of him. As a result the narrator ". . .slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree" (Poe 9). The narrator's reasoning for this was his incessant drinking and short temperament, although that is hardly an excuse. Later on in the story, the narrator finds another cat, who he also attempts to kill for no good reason.

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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).

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How is the horror genre element of foreshadowing shown in “The Black Cat”? The strongest example of foreshadowing comes in the form of the black and white cat, who not only is missing an eye like Pluto, reminding his narrator of his violent act; but his white mark on his chest changes shape to look like the gallows. This foreshadows the judgement that will ultimately find the narrator. The quote, “Yet, mad am I not- and very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I die, and today I would unburthen my soul.

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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.

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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.

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Through a set of various essays spanning a plethora of topics, The Great Cat Massacre written by Robert Darnton and published by Basic Books in 1984, uses the common thread of stories to delve into early modern French culture. The book weaves through the fairy tales of the French Peasantry, the trial and massacre of cats in Paris, a man’s complete description of Montpellier, a police officer’s accounts of authors, the writing of the Encyclopédie, and finishes with the way people read philosophy and other texts. Through these six essays Darnton reveals the way that the people in France wrote and talked about things. They reveal the way that ordinary people interacted with their surroundings.

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“But Tomorrow I die, Today I would unburthen my soul,”[pg.115]. The author Edgar Allen Poe, Wrote these horror stories titled, The Black Cat, and The Tell-Tale Heart, which took place at night. In the story, The main character, The narrator, Killed the cat and killed the old man and he regretted both of them. You should not kill things you love even if they did something bad to you. First, We'll find out how the setting conflicts with my theme.

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

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As one of the most controversial American literary figures, Edgar Allan Poe has always attracted considerable attention from both critics and readers alike. Due to his allegedly eccentric personality and the dubious circumstances surrounding his death, the public perception of the writer has often been somewhat mythologized. When it comes to his works, Poe has been both critically acclaimed and disparaged, both acknowledged and disputed, but rarely ignored. As he left behind a significantly influential literary legacy, his place among the most important writers in American literature is today undeniable. Being both a journalist and a fiction writer, Poe produced numerous texts ranging from tales and poems to critical essays, reviews and newspaper

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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