The Black Cat Unreliable Essay

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. 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. In the “Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe uses again two sides of one self. At the beginning of the story, the narrator notices, “the remodelled and inverted images of

The narrator feels “utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium” (“Fall of the House of Usher”474). The narrator openly confesses that he uses drugs and that he is depressed which can cloud a person 's judgement. By the end of the story the narrator becomes frighten by the house but says, “irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened --I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me --to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence” (“The Fall of The House of Usher” 488). At this moment the narrator has become more frightened than ever and it is unlikely that see things for what they