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The Imp Of The Perverse Analysis

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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

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849 Words | 4 Pages

“The feeling of guilt is your conscience calling your attention to the higher road, and your heart wishing you had taken it.” The poem “I Can Stand Him no Longer” by Raphael Dumas and “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe are pieces of literature that develop the thematic topic of guilt using literary devices such as metaphors, connotations, similes and etc. Both stories are about a person who commits a deed that he is later guilty of doing. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a man commits a murder of an old neighbor and tries to hide the crime. However, he later finds himself guilty of doing so and accepts his crime in front of the police.

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564 Words | 3 Pages

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 author increases the feeling of anxiety in the story by using foreshadowing. For example, after the narrator obtains the second black cat, he notices that the white patch on the second cat’s chest is forming into something. When the narrator realizes what the shape of the patch on the beast chest is, he states, “It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to have—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was how, I say, the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!” (Poe 4)

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One comparison is that both narrators’ victims were people whom they cared about and loved immensely. In “The Black Cat,” the writer kills his wife only because she gets in the way while he is trying to harm the cat. The text states, “...this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain.” This sentence from the story shows how furious the writer was.

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532 Words | 3 Pages

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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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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The Imp of the Perverse written by Edgar Allan Poe, is about a man coming to terms with his reality. Throughout the story the main character continuously thinks about what he did and how God would react to it. Throughout the story Allan Poe use sensory details and images to change the mood throughout the excerpt. Poe uses sensory details and images to change the mood because he wants the reader to understand and feel what the main character is going through. When the story begins the main character is thinking about murdering his friend but doesn’t know if he should do it or not.

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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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647 Words | 3 Pages

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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This essay will be focusing on the world where his story “The Black Cat” takes place. This world of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” is unnatural, with heavy themes of violence. Characters in this world behave unnaturally with violence and cruelty, and murder is commonplace. “The Black Cat”" starts off a man who loves his black cat Pluto. Though he loves Pluto he begin starts to have outbursts due to alcoholism.

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854 Words | 4 Pages

Comparative essay between The Black Cat and The Cat from Hell Thos about comparing and contrasting between Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Stephen King’s “The Cat from Hell”. Both of the authors are greatly known for their gothic stories. This essay is also going to mention a lot of suspense techniques those two authors use and compare them. As you know, suspense is a technique use in English gothic literature to make the readers feel nervous about what is going to happen in the story itself.

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1383 Words | 6 Pages

Most of the narrations like in "The Black Cat" give a sense of irrationality. Hatred, melancholy, woe and distress, his characters rely more on the human side showing their mental state, taking his stories to have a bigger impact on the reader’s minds. This is attributed to the period where his works were written, as stated earlier. Poe’s usage of resources like dark atmospheres, messing around with the time in which the story is represented, this was most commonly used to alter reader’s ideas of the perfection and the beauty and divert them more to the contemporary side. He liked to mix different settings with times who were most likely to confuse the reader’s perception of it, making his stories more suspenseful.

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1371 Words | 6 Pages

The killing is an impulsive action which is like the previous story mentioned, “Lamb to the Slaughter”. What makes the story different is that the villain in “The Black Cat” is in while in “Lamb to the Slaughter” is caused by Patrick’s saying about divorce. Poe’s first person narrating story, “The Black Cat” has my concern for the reason that the perspective holds a crucial part of the story. We can know the metamorphosis of the narrator’s thoughts. At the beginning of the story, mentioned how he felt towards animals as he

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588 Words | 3 Pages

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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910 Words | 4 Pages

Another theme is the power of the dead over the living. Even when the cat dies he still haunts the narrator after life. This help the madness drive within the characters mind. A barrier is broken between life and death in “The fall of house Usher” the sister rises back in bloodied clothes and “The Fall of the House of Usher” the dead actually comes back to life. “It was …the figure of lady Madeline of House Usher” (Poe 515).

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