Symbolism In The Black Cat

Concerning “The Black Cat”, Poe vividly portrays individuality as a connecting theme to Romanticism because of the narrator’s treatment of each character of the story’s characters, his wife and the cat. In the story, the narrator kills his wife in a “more than demonical” rage, for no other reason than to express his rage at his wife’s interference between him and the cat (723). He acted alone, with no prompting from anyone other than himself. The cat as a character receives no different of treatment from the narrator’s wife: even the wife’s own intervention on the cat’s behalf does not save it from its eventual demise, rather the narrator “firmly resolved to put into death”(723). The only way the cat escapes death is through hinting at the narrator’s murder to the police through the house’s walls.

“The Black Cat” is one of Poe’s more gruesome stories. It is one of the darkest stories he has written. The narrator opens the story by saying he is sane. It is the night before he dies. The story talks about the narrator’s past and how he knew so many people who all

	In Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Black Cat," symbolism is used to show the narrator’s capacity for violence, madness, and guilt. "The Black Cat," written by Edgar Allan Poe serves as a reminder for all of us. The Capacity for violence and horror lies within each of

Edgar Allan Poe shows his insanity in the Black Cat through irony. The narrator says in the begining of the story; "My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events"(1). Later readers discover the fact that the events are in no way mere household events, buts much more gruesome and highlights the narrator's perverseness. Later, the narrator buries his wife in a very loosely constructed wall, yet when the police come by he tells them; "By the bye, gentlemen, this - this is a very well constructed house"(5). As he tells them this he knocks against the wall and the cat cries. This stirs the policemen and we soon realize it was not a well constructed wall as the bricks

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

“The Black Cat” is an old short story written by Edgar Allan Poe an American Writer. It is a horror fiction story which demonstrate the fascinating changes that the human mind has during the abuse of alcohol. The protagonist is physiological corrupter by the abuse of alcohol and his mind play games with itself. He changes his personality as the story progresses and the way that he treats others around him. Everyone is affected by his behavior even his lovely cat. The cat becomes the object of his hate and in some way it is the first thing that he blames about his irrational acts. In the short story “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allan Poe, uses a varied forms of Irony, dramatic Irony, verbal Irony, and situation irony to produce a transformation of love threw hate along of the story.

The Narrator in “The Black Cat” is explained as a man who fell into alcoholism and let deception take control over his mindset (Poe 79). His change of perspective over things causes him to believe his beloved first black cat (Pluto) is evil and demonic when the cat bites him one day (Poe 80). During the illusion from the excessive alcohol, he hangs Pluto (Poe 80). From guilt further on from killing his first cat, the narrator adopts another black cat. A while later, he comes to believe that the new cat has the same characteristics that Pluto had (Poe 82). In an act of fit from the new Black cat almost tripping him on the cellar stairs, the narrator starts to try to kill him with an axe (Poe 84). His wife comes in and tries to stop him, but instead that causes him to kill her. The narrator hides his wife’s body in a cellar wall, meanwhile the cat vanished (Poe 84). Four days later, the police came to do a thorough search. The narrator acted strangely calm and innocent, as if he had done nothing. They discovered her corpse with the cat standing on her head howling in the cellar wall though, and took the narrator into custody. (Poe 85-86).

One of the more pronounced things in “The Black Cat” is the constant mood switching. One moment everything will be peaceful and happy, the next, the narrator will be stabbing a cat in the eye. Behavioral changes are one of the most notable effects of alcohol, Poe including these changes in the story emphasize the importance of it to the plot, and to the overall theme. Poe likely wrote literature to give an idea of what it’s like to be in his shoes: to suffer from an extreme addiction to alcohol. As it says in the story, “Pluto -- this was the cat's name -- was my favorite pet and playmate… Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character -- through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance -- had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.” This sentence serves as a transition between the mood of delightfulness to the mood of terror, which can easily be seen by reading the rest of that portion of the story.

Throughout all the short stories and poems wrote by Edgar Allan Poe, some connections can be made on the content. The Black Cat, and The Raven, are two narratives wrote by Poe, that unveil the themes and symbols he often uses in his work. Poe is on the mysterious side, but he is also taking the life he is given, and making his narratives raw and realist by some degree. Poe uses techniques that left him express his imagination through writing. There are many different ideas and questions rising from all his work. The Black Cat and The Raven, are two narratives that use similar themes and symbols that allow readers to receive a small connection of the madness inside of the narrators.

Although now seen as the father of the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was previously viewed as a drunken failure. Within Poe’s writings much of his own life riddled with guilt, anxiety, alcohol, depression and death shines through resulting in works that appear unrelated yet once dissected prove similar. This is true for Poe’s works “The Raven” and “The Black Cat”. Poe’s examples of gothic fiction share the use of the color black and a rapid digression of the narrator 's sanity while seemingly unveiling Poe’s internal pain. Despite these similarities, Poe’s works also differ immensely. “The Black Cat” focuses around death while “The Raven” is fixed around discovering the reasoning for a bird 's arrival. Moreover, gothic themes seen within “The Raven” do not necessarily remain constant when compared to “The Black Cat”.

Poe gives many gruesome and frightening details that make “The Black Cat” a horror fiction short story. Horror fiction is a genre of fiction designed to startle, frighten, or disgust the reader by inducing feelings of horror. Poe inducing feelings of horror through things that take place in the story such as the stabbing of Pluto, the first cat. When Poe wrote, “I took from my waistcoat pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of the eyes from the socket!” (Poe 436), he gives the reader a startled and disgusting feeling due to the gruesome depth of the sentence. Poe “darkens” the story even more with the hanging of Pluto and his wife’s murder. Poe writes about his wife’s murder and he gives evil details on the ideas of burying her in his

The greatest metaphor throughout this tale is the black cat. While the narrator’s wife has been known to refer to the dark-haired feline as a “witch in disguise”, the metaphor for Poe is that the cat is not only a superstitious monster but it is also a metaphor for being the narrator’s own personal demon (Poe 706). The recurring events with the black cats in the story portray that they are metaphors for the narrator’s own problems that haunt him. As the series of events continue throughout the story, the cat becomes a visual element in the scene for the narrator’s recurring violence and finally brings him to the point of his insanity.

The symbols used in ¨The Black Cat.¨ “Poe uses a cat to show a difficulty of human reason.” (Moreland,Rodriguez 6). This is important because the cat was always there when something bad happened. Poe had a lot of difficulty making his decisions because of his alcoholism. “ Poe used procrastination to show how humans do things and deiced things and when it’s time to explain them then it can only be explained in a negative way.” (Moreland,Rodriguez 9). This is important because it shows how Poe was very creative while using symbolism. In the story, Poe took a very long time to kill his wife and when he did, he tried to hide it but failed. “A black cat in ancient popular notion is witches in disguise.” (Moreland,Rodriguez 6). This is important because in the story, bad things only happened when the black cat was around. Poe used this to show how he believes in bad luck and how the black cat symbolized bad luck. Poe used a lot of symbolism throughout all his short stories to point out the significance of the story. The cellar that Poe describes in the story is symbolized as a jail cell. This could be because Poe knows that he has committed a crime and must pay for it and the only way he would be able to pay for it is in jail. Poe also uses a lot of imagery to describe the cellar in his story, which gives the reader a vivid image of the cellar being symbolized as a jail cell.

When looking at a piece of literature through a psychological approach it is easy to apply Sigmund Freud’s theories of the id, ego, and superego, which focus on conscious and unconscious behavior. When analyzing many of Poe’s works, critics tend to look through a psychological lens. Specifically in Poe’s The Black Cat. Some critics believe that Poe’s alcoholism is reflected in the piece, but many, such as James W. Gargano “advised the tales readers to avoid the biographical pitfall of seeing Poe and the first-person narrator of The Black Cat as ‘identical literary twins’” (Piacentino 1). It is due to his childhood that Poe’s narrator in The Black Cat subconsciously places animals before humans, thus leading to him to murder his wife.