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How Does Poe Use Irony In The Black Cat

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Everybody wants to believe that they could never have the power within themselves to do something overwhelmingly immoral. Edgar Allan Poe proves that wrong in “The Black Cat.” In “The Black Cat,” the narrator develops a drinking problem that drives him to states of uncontrollable, egocentric violence. The narrator is mentioned to have been once gentle, kind, and loving, but gets stuck in a toxic cycle of guilt and is unable to shake the supernatural presence of his cat, Pluto, that he murdered. Poe uses the repeated presence of the black cat and how it holds the narrator accountable for his crimes to show irony. A stray black cat shows up to the man's house looking almost identical to the cat he murdered, Pluto, except with a gallows mark on its chest, foreshadowing where the narrator will die because of his crimes. The narrator constantly tries to shake his guilt by blaming his actions on …show more content…

Poe uses the symbol of the black cat constantly in the story to taunt the narrator and remind him of his violent, unjust actions. Even as the man is very obviously found guilty of the crime of murdering his wife, he still can only fathom the idea that the cat drew him into the murder and that it is the true reason he is going to be put to death,“…sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!” (Poe 32). The narrator never really shows true concern for moral dilemmas, and instead sees the black cat as more than enough motive to fulfill his violent urges, “the narrator dramatizes a new mode of being: the ethics of living out the drives” (Ki). Poe takes the environment of the narrator and immerses us in it to show the thought development of the narrator. As a result of this immersion, Poe illustrates the narrator's lack of control and his

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The Black Cat

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Personal subjective antagonist of the Narrator is the eyeless Black Cat. The animal reminds the Narrator of the tortures he caused to his other cat, Pluto. Narrator believes that the Black Cat deprived him of peace and made him murder his spouse with an axe: “The cat foil owed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness” (Poe 22). The Black Cat simply wouldn 't leave the protagonist alone, making him irritated. The Black Cat was also the one to expose the Narrator.

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Examples Of Suspense In The Black Cat

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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.

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Symbolism And Foreshadowing In The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

620 Words | 3 Pages

When People read this story they might think that Poe is actually crazy. Poe wrote his stories like he lived them. “The Black Cat,” written by Edgar Allan Poe, had a large amount of symbolism and foreshadowing to help the story be explained. The narrator has always, from a young age loved animals.

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Comparing The Tell-Tale Heart And The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

2264 Words | 10 Pages

His conscience convinced him that the policemen knew, he grew stressed and anxious. The narrator felt such agony that confessing was a better outcome than continuing to be tortured (Poe, 619). At last, his own conscience, in the beating sound form, made him yell out the truth and say where the body was. In The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator has little to no morals; he only feels guilt about his first murder, which was his cat named Pluto, but finds some kind of satisfaction in committing

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A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Black Cat

2388 Words | 10 Pages

The narrator's unawareness of his unraveling humanity serves as an experimental claim, paralleling our humanity and unreliability, seen in our personal type two narrator and the anti-bildungsroman of life. By seeing ourselves within Poe's narrative, we learn about ourselves as human beings. As such, it is evident that everyone should read "The Black Cat" to gain insight into our own

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Abuse In The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

165 Words | 1 Pages

In Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat," the narrator becomes increasingly insane and violent, leading to the abuse and eventual murder of his wife and his beloved pet cat, Pluto. The narrator, who is an alcoholic, mistreats everyone emotionally. While in his drunken state, he started to take his anger out on his cat and wife. He grabbed the cat and cut an eye out and then hung the cat from a tree. There was a fire at the house and when he returned, the narrator saw the cat’s shadow on the remaining wall.

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The Influence Of Alcohol In Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat

520 Words | 3 Pages

In the story, The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, Poe is a mysterious, ill-mannered husband who kills his wife accidentally when he attempts to kill their second cat Pluto, who his wife adores. When he suspects that his neighbors may have noticed his wife is absent he takes to their cellar to hide her dead body behind the plaster walls. Soon, the police demand a search, discover nothing and are about to leave when they hear a cat whine behind the cellar wall that Poe is standing near. Poe is taken to jail and writes his story from his cell, where he tells us he is going to be immediately executed. Poe is guilty and even though he was sane when he killed her he feels very distraught.

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The Black Cat Unreliable Essay

516 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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The Effects Of Guilt In The Black Cat By Edgar Allen Poe

511 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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Effects Of The Black Cat

675 Words | 3 Pages

He hides both the cat and his wife’s body in the walls in his basement but then later confess to the police that he had killed her. In his story "The Black Cat," Poe focuses on the theme of alcoholism through character development, conflict, imagery, and metaphors to show readers how alcoholism can destroy one’s mind and cause one to do insane acts. Poe uses character development to illustrate how alcohol can negatively change someone. When the narrator began to grow a dislike for his second cat, he realized that he was the problem and that all the alcohol he had been drinking had changed him.

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Similarities Between The Black Cat And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

544 Words | 3 Pages

In the short story, “The Black Cat”, the narrator suffers from alcoholism and turns toward violence against his cat, Pluto, and his wife. Following the burning of his house, the narrator’s madness heightens when he kills his wife and cat. After walling up the bodies, the narrator states how his “happiness was supreme” and that murdering his wife “disturbed [him] but little” (Poe). The narrator's lack of remorse or regret for his actions further underscores his instability and calls into question the truthfulness of his narrative. By creating a narrator whose grip on reality is tenuous at best, Poe establishes an atmosphere of tension and suspense that keeps readers on edge.

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The Black Cat Insanity Analysis

717 Words | 3 Pages

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

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The Black Cat Argumentative Essay

647 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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Black Cat Symbolism

1540 Words | 7 Pages

Alluding to the color often associated with evil and darkness, The black fur, often correlated with the sense of darkness and evil, foreshadows the relentless descent into chaos and destruction that the protagonist will experience throughout the short story. The cat's one eye further symbolizes the penetrating gaze of an unyielding conscience, which relentlessly scrutinizes the protagonist's heinous acts and drives him to complete madness. Poe's deft handling of the black cat as an emblem of the dark and mysterious aspects of the human mind serves to underscore the fragility of our moral compass and the lurking presence of insidious violence within ourselves. As the story unfolds, the cat's symbolism evolves and deepens, culminating in a haunting

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Examples Of Human Nature In The Black Cat

588 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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