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The Black Cat Research Paper

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In the short story, “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, the idea of whether the narrator is insane or sane is questioned. The narrator develops a drinking problem and becomes violent. He harms his cat, and then once it is healed, he murders it. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife find a new cat, similar to his old one. He grows to despise this new cat, which leads him to attempting to kill it. The wife gets in the narrator’s way of killing the cat, causing her death instead. Although he tries to cover up the murder, he is caught and taken to jail, which is where the readers begin to wonder if he is insane. Edgar Allen Poe’s belief in the duality of man, the narrator’s alcohol addiction, and his awareness of his actions deem the narrator sane and fully responsible for his actions. Edgar Allen Poe, the author of many gruesome stories, had a unique view on the human race. He believed that there was a duality to man, for humans had an evil side to them, which was not to be …show more content…

The narrator was fully capable of knowing right from wrong and was able to feel sorrow, which does not follow the “guidelines” on insanity. A counter-perspective that someone could argue is that the narrator’s actions are impulsive and he cannot control them, which are signs of insanity. To invalidate that statement, one would say that yes, they are impulsive, but it is not due to insanity. As mentioned before, alcohol can have a strong influence on the human mind, altering one’s original personality. Also, due to the alcohol, anger will partake as a factor. Anger and alcohol can both cause thoughtless actions. Impulsive behavior can be due to many things, although in this situation, it is due to an

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Insanity is a common theme throughout Edgar Allen Poe’s body of work. Though it creates interesting characters and situations, it also makes us wonder how much of the story that the narrator is telling us is actually true. In The_Black_Cat, William_Wilson, and The_Raven, the narrators seem to be speaking the truth that they believe. However the narrator -in each story- also appears to get a few details wrong, most likely because of their unwell state.

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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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To begin with, the theme of insanity is present throughout Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the beginning of the short story, the narrator begins by saying “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad” (Poe 440). He began trying to give reasoning for his actions, hinting to readers that he had previously committed a horrific act. The narrator realized he had every reason to care and love the old man for “he never wronged me… never given me an insult” (Poe 440) but instead of feeling compassionate, he had an insane desire to kill the old man. He questioned why he would want to inflict harm onto someone he had no bitterness towards and comes up with an explanation.

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The most evident sign of his insanity is his inability to behave naturally. For instance, the narrator was known for his “docility and humanity” as a child (Poe 670). Additionally, he once described himself as a lover of all animals, yet, after developing an alcohol addiction, the narrator began to abuse his dear pets. In his testimony, the narrator stated that “the cat avoided my presence… [so] I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife… and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” (Poe 671).

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.Morgan Elswick critic article: the unspeakable fearing madness in Poe’s black cat (2015) is in fact signifying that part of Edgar Allan Poe persuasiveness comes from his tales of horrors with emphasizing on what everyday people feared. He targeted what he knew to be massive fears of his own time and blew these fears up into tales of suspense’s, horror, and the supernatural. Inside “The Dark Cat,” for occurrence, Poe plays on the fear of franticness, or a discernible need of reason. The storyteller of “The Dark Cat” shows a few properties of madness — he disfigures an blameless cat, hangs it, slaughters his spouse in a fit of mood, and at long last hides her decaying cadaver behind a brick divider.

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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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Murder is prevalent, and often the main plot of many of Poe’s stories. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator murders both his cat and his wife in gruesome ways. “Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.

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Edgar Allan Poe often demonstrates madness in his short stories. Many times it comes from the first-person narrator. While the narrators are similar in the fact that they are both insane, they also have a lot of differences in the way that they are insane. A great way to compare the way the insanity differs in the narrators, is to compare two of Poe’s stories. Stories such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” do a good job showing the similarities and differences between the insanity in both of the stories, as well as the insanity in other short stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s.

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To properly determine whether or not the narrator in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” is insane a definition of insanity must be brought to light; possible explanations for his transgression must be examined, and the scope of information that has been provided must be understood for what it is. To understand if someone is insane or not, American society must lay bare a universal definition for insanity. As a whole, society today does not shy away from using words such as insane or crazy. This careless use of words leads to the definitions becoming less clear.

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