The Insanity of “The Black Cat” Edgar Allan Poe left the ending of most of his stories enigmatic and therefore, open to controversial interpretations. Many debate whether the endings are the result of insanity or of haunting. It is evident that “The Black Cat” ending is caused by insanity, based on multiple re-occurrences that happen to the narrator. Many situations from the story support this claim. 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 …show more content…
This behavior shows the narrator’s insanity is the main cause of most of his actions. Since the space behind the wall was all desolate, except for the corpse and the black cat, the rapping of the cane created a sound that showed that it was hollow. The tapping on the wall accentuates the situation, and arouses suspicion about what could be behind the wall. The narrator also draws attention to the wall and himself when he says both, “By the bye, gentlemen, this-this is a very well-constructed house” (Poe 20), and “These walls are solidly put together” (Poe 20). In both of these quotes, the narrator comments on the corpse behind the wall indirectly. Both quotes foreshadow that something atrocious is going to happen to either the wall or both the narrator and the wall at the same time. In conclusion, the ending of “The Black Cat” results because of insanity. A variety of evidence from the text supports this supposition. All the narrator’s actions, from the abuse to the murders, are some effects of his alcoholism and insanity. A sane person clearly would not carry out these heinous acts and behave the way the narrator did after committing
In the story, the narrator attacks and wounds his cat while he is extremely drunk. He is overcome with the ‘fiery demon of alcohol’, much like Poe became before he died. In short, Poe’s life was rather terrible, and it’s apparent that these dark events in his life stimulated his unique and creepy style of writing, which is what he’s famous
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.
The narrator believes himself to be very intelligent and clever when he goes into the old man’s room at midnight. Poe’s word choice of “caution” and “how wisely” represents the man’s view of his own sanity. Yet the act he performs and the reasoning behind his murderous intention convinces the reader that the narrator has lost his sanity. He plots and is driven to kill a man after claiming, “ I loved the old man.
Suspense in “The Black Cat” 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.
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.
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.
(Poe 4) After killing the man; chopping up his body; and hiding it beneath the floorboards, the narrator the narrator hears a noise that, at first, he cannot place. The heartbeat of a dead man and his general fear of the old man illustrate his Schizophrenia and his disconnection from reality. These diagnoses are examples of the narrator’s characteristics that prove his
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.
One comparison is that both narrators’ victims were people whom they cared about and loved immensely. In “The Black Cat,” the writer kills his wife only because she gets in the way while he is trying to harm the cat. The text states, “...this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain.” This sentence from the story shows how furious the writer was.
The narrator is confined to his path of madness and drunkenness. The narrator’s irritation gets worse, and he attempts to kill the new cat. His wife interjects, and the narrator kills his wife in anger. He chooses to hide his wife’s body in the walls of the cellar.
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.
The narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.
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.
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.
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.