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The Black Cat Symbolism

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In life some people struggle to become a good person and try to do the right thing. Some people fail with the struggle. Edgar Allan Poe “ The Black Cat” is no different than real life. The narrator has a tough life. Due to alcohol, he makes bad choices, He kills Pluto the black cat, and his wife because he thinks Pluto is the reason he has bad luck, but the alcohol is the reason why he's killing people. The somber life the narrator has is bad he is killing all the people due to alcohol.In “ The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe uses symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony to represent death. The wife of the narrator, as well as Pluto, the owner’s cat, are killed in the story. After the narrator kills Pluto,he feels another cat pressing on his heart. “ by saying.“ dreams and feelings him sitting next to my face his heavy body pressing down on my heart” Its symbolic because it's representing the cat after the narrator killed pluto. The effect of symbolism in this scene builds the mood. The mood is somber and depressing as well as tense because the narrator kills people in the story. The narrator believes his cat is now evil and is trying to kill him. (Poe 3) . …show more content…

Pluto represent the ruler of the underworld and death according to the greek morphology. “Pluto is black all over, very large, beautiful and intelligent, one eye glosses like fire. The narrator is saying the cat is the reason why he's killing people. The narrator’s Wife, “ she often laughed about what some people believe; Some people believe that all black cats are evil, enemies in a cat's body. Though he loves Pluto,the narrator begins to suffer from violent mood changes because of drink (Poe 1).In The Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe uses foreshadowing. “This story end with my end, with my end, with my death tomorrow.(Poe 1) The narrator builds

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After he killed Pluto he found love for a cat that did not exist but brought home and cared for it. After a while the cat starts to enrage Poe’s character again and tries to kill it, but ends up

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His path only grows darker as he proceeds from verbally mistreating his wife to physically abusing her. The love and tenderness of his pets began to vanish and not only neglected them but placed them through maltreatment as well. Regardless, we observe his favourite cat, Pluto didn’t directly experience the man’s aggressive conduct until a later night, although Pluto is still aware of the man’s actions. As the man returned home, intoxicated by the alcohol he had consumed in town, he noticed that Pluto evaded his presence. Frustrated by this act, the man attempted to seize the old black cat but was responded with a wound in his hand instead.

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Here he reflects upon his childhood of a cat and the story drastically changes to where he kills this cat. The inspiration of his cat leads to mental unsteadiness to where he kills his wife in the end. " Sat, the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder" (Poe 14). The power of government establishes the laws. Therefore he had broken them when commuting murder to his cat for animal abuse, and first degree murder for his wife.

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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).

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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.

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he continues his explanation with “My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way” (Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, page 532). In the beginning, the narrator maltreats the animals and even his wife, but not Pluto, he has a special connection with Pluto. Poe’s stories often show the narrator going mad and gaining a desire to hurt someone or something.

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In these two stories Poe uses foreshadowing in way that if the reader spots the small details or Poes “word playing “ he/she can predict what will happen or get a hint of what will happen. In Black Cat there are few foreshadows. One foreshadow is when the narrator sees a cat in the wall and Pluto`s color being black is believed to be unlucky and in this story the narrator is unhappy and unlucky. The narrator gets gouth because of a cat being inside a wall.

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In, “The Black Cat,” the main character comes home drunk and attacks his innocent cat. “I was overcome by the fiery demon of alcohol,” the drunken character thought. This was the last character Poe described like himself before he died. In 1846 Edgar published a book called,” The Cask of Amontillado.”

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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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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.

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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

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The story expressed the depiction of a slow, torture infused death through the hanging of the cat in “The Black Cat.” Poe Expresses the death of his cat in the following quote“ One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — Hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me.” The use of terror, furthermore, exemplifies the vision of horror in short stories which helped the authors of the future when expressing the pain of a

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The black cats in the story represent bad luck, which foreshadows the rest of the story. One thing a black cat was known for was bad luck back in the 19th century and still are today. (Kimberly Lim, 2016) Finally, in The Pit and The Pendulum, the pit and the pendulum represented death. The narrator was supposed to fall into the pit, but avoided it and lived.

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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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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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