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The Black Cat Unreliable

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In the short horror story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe; you follow the narrator who talks about “mere household events” in his life. It opens with the narrator telling a story form inside his jail cell. He talks about his love for animals ever since he was a small child. He talks about his love for a certain cat named Pluto. Him and his wife have a house filled with many different animals. He talks about how he abused all the animals except for Pluto but when he went our drinking one night, he cut out Pluto’s eye, later killing him. Therefore the narrator is not guilty under the reason of being insane. After finding a new cat similar to Pluto, he abuses it until his wife gets in the way who he then kills. In this story the narrator is unreliable because of the narrator’s mental state. Readers can predict the narrator is unreliable because his “mere household events” included stabbing and hanging a cat. He could not control his actions and urges to harm animals and then later, his wife. “I grew, day-by-day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my …show more content…

He becomes unstable and that results in him killing his wife. The story provides clues that he has always been insane such as he abused animals at an early age, which is a sign of being a psychopath. The narrator could not control his urges to hurt animals and people, thus causing him to have a psychotic break and kill his wife. He was also an alcoholic, which did not improve his condition but rather made him become more deranged. Some people may think he is guilty because he did have control of his anger and he felt guilt when he hurt his cat, Pluto. I think that the narrator did not regret when he hurt Pluto but felt ashamed that he had to hurt

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The internal conflict that the narrator experienced developed the story because if the narrator had not gone through anything then the story wouldn't have gone on. There was many internal conflicts in this story for example the narrator’s drinking problem, the first cat, and the second cat. One of thefirst examples is that he started to drink. The drinks made him mad and he started to hit his wife and the animals. Another example is that he got mad at the cat and cut out its eye the cat’s name was Pluto.

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The Black Cat is a short story that shares a tale of a man and his cat, Pluto. The man was once kind and loved animals, but due to a large intake of alcohol, he becomes aggressive towards not only his wife, but Pluto as well. The narrator explains his change of heart by saying, “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.”

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The narrator sees a cat that resembles Pluto as the cat “was a black cat – a very large one – fully as large as Pluto and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but [the] cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white covering nearly the whole region of the beast”. This is showing that the owner is getting this sense of remorse towards his original companion which he committed a deadly sin. This is also showing that the owner is far from being himself and finally has become insane as right after Pluto’s death that another cat that resembles Pluto shows up and the cat is calm towards In Conclusion the owner goes through so many various behaviors that control his actions towards the animals and people around him that it makes him seem he is only hurting himself.

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After he attacks his cat, the cat begins to avoid the narrator. Though he recognizes the reason why his cat is scared of him, he says,” I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation.” (Poe, 273). As his cat ignores him more, the narrator gets more frustrated which leads him to kill the cat and eventually his wife.

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However, due to being intoxicated, he rips its eyes out in rage and hangs it soon after in regret. When a cat looking similar to his old cat (Pluto) appears, the man attempts to kill it, only killing his

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The narrator in ‘The Black Cat’ seems to act like two people at once . The narrator starts his story by trying to tell his readers he is not crazy. He says, “Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream (“The Black Cat”).” This is a good example of unreliable narrator, because only crazy people try really hard to make others believe they are not crazy. The narrator does not help his case when he admits to hurting the cat for fun.

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The narrator used to love the black cat when he was younger, as he began to consume more alcohol his beloved cat started to annoy him. The more he drank the more violent and mentally unstable he became. He states “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original

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However, alcohol made the narrator more moody, irritable, and regardless of others feelings. Alcohol caused the narrator to mistreat Pluto, which made Pluto avoid the narrator. The narrator took the cat and cut out its eye in anger. Pluto avoided the narrator even more but was caught again and “[hanged] [Pluto] to the limb of a tree” (Poe 2). The narrator tried justifying hanging his cat and believed he had committed no offense.

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His madness contributes to the unreliability because after this he writes from his jail cell “I did it precisely because it was wrong.” The madness overcomes the narrator showing his insanity. That night the house catches on fire and burns down. There is a imprint of a “gigantic cat” with a rope around his neck on the wall. The man thought a neighbor cut the cat down and throw it through a window.

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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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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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In the story, the narrator begins to struggle with an addiction to alcohol and his cat Pluto starts to realize his behavior and begins to resent him. The narrator does something awful to his cat Pluto, and he then starts to feel guilty. A new cat comes around and the narrator shortly starts to resent

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat”, the narrator is trapped in serial actions of abusing and murdering. He finds himself failing to explain the causes and effects of his actions. The narrator explains his childhood obsession by saying “I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them” (Poe, p. 718). On the other hand, he fails to find any reason behind the destruction of his childhood nature when he says “Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character – through the instrumentality of the fiend intemperance – had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.

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“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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This is because of his gradual development of an addiction to alcohol. Alcohol heavily modifies the brain and many people become much more aggressive when under the influence. He becomes invested by evil thoughts and ideas. In loneliness, “evil thoughts became [his] sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of [his] usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind,”.

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