THE Black Cat BY

EDGAR ALLAN POE

REZA IRANPUR
THE BLACK CAT

 The Black Cat is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe

published in the August 19, 1843. It is a study of
the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis
with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".
 In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime
and believes himself unassailable, but eventually
breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a
nagging reminder of his guilt.
The plot

 The story is in first person narrative who is quite

unreliable and seems quite distressed when
narrating the story since the following day his life
would end.
 He begins the story by saying that how much he
loved animals especially in his early childhood. He
mentions that even after his marriage, he and his
wife had so many pets including a large cat
named pluto.
 He continues by saying that how much he loved
the cat and how much the cat loved him
 This friendship however doesn’t last much! The
narrator becomes an alcoholic and one night
while really hammered comes home and sees
that the cat is avoiding him, he becomes
outraged and tries to seize the cat, at the
moment, the cat bites the narrator, only adding
up to his rage, he decides to gouge the cat`s eye
with a pen knife.
 This causes the cat to avoid the narrator and be
afraid of him in the following days, the narrator
first feels remorseful and guilty but after a while
this feeling changes to anger and irritation he
decides to hang the cat from a noose attached
to a tree in his garden. That very night his house
catches fire burning down their every belongings
and their money.
 The next day the narrator returns to his house, and
sees that only one wall has remained, when he
gets closer he sees an apparition of the cat.
 The narrator begins to miss Pluto, feeling guilty.
Some time later, he finds a similar cat in a tavern.
It is the same size and color as the original and is
even missing an eye. The only difference is a large
white patch on the animal's chest. The narrator
takes it home, but soon begins to loathe, even
fear the creature. After a time, the white patch of
fur begins to take shape and, to the narrator,
forms the shape of the gallows
 This terrifies and angers him more, and he avoids
the cat whenever possible. Then, one day when
the narrator and his wife are visiting the cellar in
their new home, the cat gets under its master's
feet and nearly trips him down the stairs. Enraged,
the man grabs an axe and tries to kill the cat but
is stopped by his wife − whom, out of fury, he kills
instead. To conceal her body he removes bricks
from a protrusion in the wall, places her body
there, and repairs the hole
 A few days later, when the police show up at the
house to investigate the wife's disappearance, they
find nothing and the narrator goes free. The cat,
which he intended to kill as well, has also gone
missing. This grants him the freedom to sleep, even
with the burden of murder.
 On the last day of the investigation, the narrator
accompanies the police into the cellar. They still find
nothing significant. Then, completely confident in his
own safety, the narrator comments on the sturdiness
of the building and raps upon the wall he had built
around his wife's body. A loud, inhuman wailing
sound fills the room. The alarmed police tear down
the wall and find the wife's corpse, and on its rotting
head, to the utter horror of the narrator, is the
screeching black cat. As he words it: "I had walled
the monster up within the tomb!"
Analysis

 We may say that the narrator of "The Black Cat"

has questionable sanity. Near the beginning of
the tale, the narrator says he would be "mad
indeed" if he should expect a reader to believe
the story, implying that he has already been
accused of madness.
 The extent to which the narrator claims to have
loved his animals suggests mental instability in the
form of having “too much of a good thing”.
 Since the narrator’s wife shares his love of animals,
he likely thinks of her as another pet
 One of Poe's darkest tales, "The Black Cat"
includes his strongest denunciation of alcohol. The
narrator's perverse actions are brought on by
his alcoholism, a "disease" and "fiend" which also
destroys his personality.
 The use of the black cat evokes
various superstitions, including the idea voiced by
the narrator's wife that they are all witches in
disguise.
 The titular cat is named Pluto after the Roman
god of the Underworld.
 Although Pluto is a neutral character at the beginning of the
story, he becomes antagonistic in the narrator’s eyes once the
narrator becomes an alcoholic. The alcohol pushes the
narrator into fits of intemperance and violence, to the point at
which everything angers him – Pluto in particular, who is
always by his side, becomes the malevolent witch who haunts
him even while avoiding his presence. When the narrator cuts
Pluto’s eye from its socket, this can be seen as symbolic of self-
inflicted partial blindness to his own vision of moral goodness.
 The fire that destroys the narrator’s house symbolizes the
narrator’s "almost complete moral disintegration". The only
remainder is the impression of Pluto upon the wall, which
represents his unforgivable and incorrigible sin.
 From a rhetorician's standpoint, an effective scheme of
omission that Poe employs is diazeugma, or using many verbs
for one subject; it omits pronouns. Diazeugma emphasizes
actions and makes the narrative swift and brief.
 In some stories (think stories by Ernest Hemingway)
drinking has both positive and negative effects on
the drinkers. Not so in "The Black Cat." The unnamed
narrator of this grim tale claims he began abusing his
wife and pets when his drinking got out of control,
wrecking his personality. Some readers think this is a
"temperance" narrative, a popular genre in Poe's
day. "Temperance" in this context means "sobriety."
The Temperance Movement focused on educating
the public on the perceived dangers of drinking,
and pushing legislature prohibiting the manufacture,
use, and sale of alcohol. In a temperance narrative
alcohol is the major issue, and is to blame for all the
bad things that happen in the story. Here, alcohol
fades out of the story just when things get bad,
suggesting that alcohol is only one of many factors
in the narrator's moral breakdown.
 Disturbing physical and psychological
transformations – often for the worst – are
characteristic of most horror and Gothic tales. In
"The Black Cat" some form of transformation occurs
in nearly every paragraph. For the narrator, these
changes are psychological. After he gets married,
his personality spirals deeper and deeper toward the
dark side, cruelly abusing his pets and his wife. His
initially happy home life is turned upside down, and
everyone involved is adversely affected and
changed for the worse. Like many horror stories, "The
Black Cat" also offers the possibility
of supernatural change, though this might just be a
figment of his imagination, or an excuse to deflect
blame from his crime.