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The Effects Of Guilt In The Black Cat By Edgar Allen Poe

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As Robert South once stated, “guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defies and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal” (Robert South). For the madman narrator, when he committed the crime of killing the old man, he began his descendence into a guilty conscience. Throughout the short story The Black Cat, Edgar Allen Poe uses various symbols to convey the effects of guilt and the descent into madness. The narrator proves his madness by attempting to separate the persona of the old man, whom he claims he loves, from the old man’s supposedly evil eye which triggers the narrator’s hatred. By placing his fixation on the eyes that resembled that of a
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