The Black Cat and The Imp of the Perverse “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!”, the narrator raged, “I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity” (Poe). Poe’s emotions or the way he feels about life and himself are mirrored in his writing. He began to drink and and slowly desolated himself from the world. After numerous deaths of loved ones, Poe became a morbid person with multiple obstacles along his path of life. His stories all tie into ghastly and gothic themes. Even though The Black Cat and The Imp of the Perverse have different settings, they correspond with the theme of horror and both have the same gothic …show more content…
In these two stories, the narrator conceives himself of being guilty due to the fact of committing a major crime. Because of the guilt, the narrator eventually reveals the remorse he has for executing his cruel deed. In the story The Black Cat the narrator confessed, “I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed”(Poe). Correspondingly, an example of guilt is used in this text from The Imp of the Perverse: “I turned—I gasped for breath. For a moment I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy” (Poe). The two stories use guilt that is associated with the narrator. In The Imp of the Perverse, the narrator is guilty for killing a guy and suffers from the symptoms of suffocation which was how he murdered the victim. Also the narrator in The Black Cat has experienced guilt when he committed the cruel crime of gauging his cat’s eye out with a knife. Despite these texts having a similarity in gothic literature techniques, they each have a different setting describing the time and place which helps create the