The Antagonist: The Black Cat
For example, after the narrator gouges his cat's eye out, the cat becomes petrified of him. As a result the narrator ". . .slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree" (Poe 9). The narrator's reasoning for this was his incessant drinking and short temperament, although that is hardly an excuse. Later on in the story, the narrator finds another cat, who he also attempts to kill for no good reason.
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).
The story continues with an event that is unfortunately far more terrible and unexpected than the previous events. The narrator allows his increasing anger towards the second black cat to lead him to killing his wife. His temper and hatred that began with the second black cat eventually ended up impacted him and his wife. The narrator states, “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan” (Poe 5).
The narrator initially restrains himself from maltreating the cat while maltreating the other animals because he has compassion for Pluto and becomes fond of him. Pluto would be fed by him and would follow the main character around. As The storyteller explains how as the years go by his friendship with Pluto continues to grow. It is concluded that Pluto and the main character have a special bond. Therefore, the cat is his favorite animal and creature to play with.
More days pass and the narrator is getting worse, he gets so mad he hangs Pluto from a tree. The narrator's wife stays with him, being an understanding wife but slowly he becomes crazier. A new cat comes, He kills his wife with an ax, and the new cat uncovers the body for the police. The narrator is to die the next day. Symbolism was used many times throughout “The Black Cat.”
One obvious and main symbol in The Black Cat is the cat himself. Pluto is a manifestation of a bad omen. Many people have heard that black cats are a bad
ad Luck Of The Black Cat Have you ever listened to that little voice inside yourself that is telling you to go down the path of no return? In “The Black Cat” the narrator is sentenced to death, however before he is executed he explains the reasons how he was caught. Edgar Allan Poe uses symbolism, irony, and personification to blame the little voice inside his head for the poor choices he knowingly made. This glimpse inside his head will help us to understand the narrator’s thoughts about what he perceives as real and and what is not . He uses symbolism for his relationship with his wife and cat, irony when he finally gets caught by police and personification when he describes his cat as a beast that is trying to get him..him to be abusive to his animal and ultimately lead him to kill his own wife.
The narrator got another cat after this and became even more insane in the way he felt about this black cat.
This passage is applicable to my claim because it clarifies how the foreshadowing is shown. The narrator cries about how frightening the ominous eye is, and how paranoid it has left him. He chuckles about how perfectly sane he is, even though he sounds like a madman. Poe creates a suspenseful atmosphere by foreshadowing the narrator’s fear of the old man’s eye.
In “The Black Cat”, he may have used the name Pluto as a symbol of an allegorical reference to a mythical God of the underworld—a dark place much like in the mind of the of his main character and the
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.
The cat was friendly to the narrator and vice versa. The narrator asked to purchase him yet the landlord had no knowledge of this cat's existence. The reason for this could be that the cat waited to appear only until the narrator came along, possibly as a reincarnation of Pluto. Reincarnation of Pluto becomes a very possible theory, not only for the fact that Pluto is the god of the dead; but on the next morning the new black cat has lost one of its eyes, just like Pluto did. This in turn causes the narrator to hate the cat and lose his composure once again.
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
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.
“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.
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