Sapul, Samantha B.

X- Responsibility

Book: The Black Cat

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

The narrator is a man who loves his wife and

animals, but over time, he becomes abusive towards
them. One night, he gouges his cat’s eye out with a pen
knife and hangs it in the garden with a noose. The cat
begins to haunt him, which causes him to adopt a nearly
identical cat. The cat slowly starts to look like the
previous cat, which causes him to loathe it. Once he
led his wife to the cellar with the cat tagging along,
which caused him to take an axe and swing at the cat.
He missed, and his wife tried to calm him down. We then
bludgeoned her through the skull and hid her body
behind a wall. The police caught him after hearing a
cat’s meow during an investigation four days later.

Edgar Allan Poe had become insane because of his

desperation for money and fear of his wife’s death, yet
he had written his greatest works in this state. He is
best known for his short stories and poems, which one
could only describe as gruesome and macabre. His
stories revolved around humanity’s psychology and dark
emotions. His death was something straight out of his
books, with many contradicting theories on how he died.
Sapul, Samantha B.
X- Responsibility

It was about the narrator’s heinous crime of

murdering his cat and his wife. Though his actions were
on impulse, he did not show remorse or shame for his
actions. It was a tale of the narrator’s need for self-
justification and his descent into madness. The
narrator was an alcoholic, which messed with his grip
and perception of reality.

It was the narrator and his guilt for killing his

black cat that resulted in the murder of his own wife.
The conflict is man vs. man. An example is when he (the
narrator) was rationalizing the mysterious appearance
of the cat he killed on the wall of his burned house.
Another is when he was thinking of ways to hide his
wife’s body.
Sapul, Samantha B.
X- Responsibility

He justified his actions of abuse and murder by

blaming it on the cat. Though he had adopted a nearly
identical cat to banish himself of the dead cat’s
apparition and haunting, he ended up dreading and
loathing the new cat. In a fit of rage he killed his
wife and hid her body to which the police found four
days letter thanks to the mewls of the new cat who was
buried along with her body.

I do not agree with the narrator’s way of solving

the conflict. This is because I do not wish for the
blood of the innocent to stain my hands. Murder is not
a solution to any problem, no matter how hard it is.
Murder goes against my moral compass, as I do not
believe it is right for anyone to take another human’s
life.
Sapul, Samantha B.
X- Responsibility

Instead of killing the black cat he first owned, he

could have given it away to a friend or just let the
cat be in the wild. The narrator could have just left
the identical cat alone instead of adopting it to cope
with his remorse. If he had avoided alcohol, he would
have kept his sanity.

I would call it "Cat’s Haunt." The guilt of his

first cat being murdered by his own hands weighed on
his shoulders so much that he started losing sleep and
began to think that it was haunting him. The remorse he
had for killing the cat was haunting him through the
new cat, as the new cat had been slowly taking on the
dead cat’s appearance.
Sapul, Samantha B.
X- Responsibility

The lesson to be learned is that how you treat

others has an impact not only on them but also on
yourself. The narrator abused his wife and the animals
he owned, which caused them to be cautious as to not
irritate him in any way. All of his pets did so except
for his black cat, which was affectionate towards him
despite the narrator kicking it away each time it
annoyed him. When he gouged the cat’s eye out, the cat
started to avoid him. When he was being affectionate to
the cat on the street, the cat trusted him enough to
come home with him. This is similar to when you treat
people with kindness; they'll trust you and treat you
the same. Just like when you treat people badly, they’d
want to avoid you.