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Examples Of Perverseness In The Black Cat

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“And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS.” Perverseness is persistently holding to what is wrong; wayward. Edgar Allen Poe’s, “The Black Cat,” is a case study of the spirit of Perverseness. “The Black Cat is a fascinating story that gives us insights into the mind of an insane man. In the short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allen Poe uses the point of view of first person unreliable to challenge the trust between the reader and the narrator. In the opening paragraph, we see that the narrator argues that he is not crazy and is perfectly sane. Generally, that makes the readers question the state of his insanity: “Yet mad am I not- and very surely do I not dream; My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events” (1). Clearly the man is reflecting that he has a contradiction within …show more content…

The man seems to have found a look-alike Pluto and is not too sure how to feel about it because it’s seems unreal. The man is expressing his disbelief between the similarities of the two cats by stating, “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery , on the morning after I brought it home, that like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes” (3). This almost seems too real to believe. What a coincidence that the man finds a cat that has the exact same features as Pluto! As readers, we begin to question if the narrator is telling the truth or he is just hallucinating? The man could possibly be seeing a ghost of Pluto. In this sense, we can believe that the cat is real and can infer from the remorse the man is feeling that he is imagining the cat has no eye. The man thought this new cat was going to appease his

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