The narrator pushed the man to kill his wife but then waits to expose the man. In the quote “It was the same horrible animal whose craft had tricked me into murder.” the narrator is trying to blame the cat for the crime he committed. The Antagonist defeats the Protagonist because at the end of the story the cat is found in the wall along with the dead body of the Protagonist wife. I believe that
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).
Next, Poe develops suspense in the black cat through the hanging of Pluto. The narrator is unbalanced and insane, yet hangs Pluto with full intent by the limb of a tree. The narrator states, Quote 1 “hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes with the bitterest remorse at my heart” (Poe 2). The violence that the narrator displays with the hanging of Pluto enroots anxiety for the perusal to know.
The fact that the narrator drinks as well emphasized on this and as a result, allows Poe to create wild events in the story. The author then recounts how he goes home drunk one day, where his cat then annoys him and he stabs its eye out, along with hanging it from a tree. The same night, his house burns down to the ground with police later finding the narrators wife buried in the basement with the cat on her. This description of crazy events shows that Poe's use of the unreliable first person narrator allows him to go on the broad aspect of crazy events in his
He then proceeds to slash at the new cat and kill his wife. When the police come, he hides his wife’s body in the wall and he loses the cat, but then the cat screams from inside the wall and the police find the body of his wife. Chaos is present in this story in the form of torture, murder, and the narrator’s descent into madness
The story is of a man distraught and changed from his struggles with alcoholism. He became an abusive husband and pet owner. His wife was disturbed by the acts of violence committed by her husband. Poe describes a scenario of which the wife attempts to stop the man from killing the cat; “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot”(19).
“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.
Edgar Allan Poe once said, “Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” It is until reading one of Poe’s works that one begins to question the mind of Poe and his characters. Especially in stories such as “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, it takes an extremely deranged mind to write in the detail and ideology as he did. In the short story, “The Black Cat”, the narrator tells his story of a cat he cherished. After a fateful night of drinking, he comes home and attacks his wife and cat, resulting in the cat losing its eye.
As Robert South once stated, “guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defies and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal” (Robert South). For the madman narrator, when he committed the crime of killing the old man, he began his descendence into a guilty conscience. Throughout the short story The Black Cat, Edgar Allen Poe uses various symbols to convey the effects of guilt and the descent into madness. The narrator proves his madness by attempting to separate the persona of the old man, whom he claims he loves, from the old man’s supposedly evil eye which triggers the narrator’s hatred.
Unfortunately, the narrator gets drunk and angry, then the narrator kills the cat after it bites him. Feeling guilty, the narrator finds another cat and tries to care for this one. In a failed attempt at killing the next cat, he ends up killing his wife and stuffing the body behind a wall. Later when the police search the house, the narrator can’t help but hear the meow coming from inside the wall. The police open the wall and find the cat lying beside the dead body.
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.
Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his ominous tone and attraction to gloomy themes in his works. Many of his works surround the circumstances of the death of a beautiful woman, such as “Ligeia,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Black Cat.” This was a very personal topic for Poe, as he lost most all the women he loved including both his biological and adoptive mothers and his wife. This gave him inspiration for many of his works and fueled his fascination with human mortality. Poe’s mother died at the young age of 24, when Poe was only three years old.
Compare/Contrast paragraph Edgar Allan Poe’s stories “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” have similarities and differences. Some of the similarities are in the way the story was told and the narrators’ mindset. As a beginning, the stories have lots of common things in the way they were told. They are both written in first-person point of view and they both start from the prison. For example the main character in “The Black Cat” said “My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.
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
Poe seems to like writing these types of stories and this may come from the fact that Poe had a rough childhood. After the death of his mother, he went to live with a foster family whose mother would die when Poe was 20. After these tragic events, Poe continued to write and would later be kicked out of college for obsessive drinking, just like the narrator of The Black Cat. With Poes' rough childhood and troubles growing up, there is no doubt that this character in
