The Role Of Alcoholism In The Works Of Edgar Allan Poe

Throughout most of his life, Edgar Allan Poe struggled with an addiction to alcohol and opium. This struggle with addiction impacted not just his personal life, but also his creative output. Poe’s reliance on alcohol heavily affected many aspects of his life, especially his writing style. Poe’s alcoholism and opium addiction is represented in many of his writings and in his characters, including the unnamed narrator from his short story “The Black Cat.” Both of Poe’s stories “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” portray his paranoia and dark thoughts. In Edgar Allen Poe’s chilling short story, “The Black Cat,” the unnamed narrator sinks into madness fueled by his increasing consumption of alcohol and his growing dependence. At first the

The unnamed narrator's descent into insanity and violence displays a resemblance to the documented effects of alcohol on Poe’s life, as explored in Robert Patterson’s, article “Once Upon a Midnight Dreary: The Life and Addictions of Edgar Allan Poe." Alcohol fuels a moral decline in both the unnamed narrator and Poe’s life. The narrator’s initial fondness for animals, “I was especially fond of animals.” (Poe 181) is quickly replaced by the narrator's increasing violent behavior when under the influence of alcohol. While Poe isn’t described as committing violent acts like in his stories, alcohol still negatively impacted his behavior and his lifestyle, as he would also often mix his alcohol with opium, “Poe's encounters with opium were less frequent than his bouts with the bottle, but he would drink laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. In contrast to the violent alcohol-inspired events he described, his writings about opium often described a “trancelike state” (Patterson 1248). These effects of opium mixed with the effects of alcohol could be the reason Poe never acted upon the violent thoughts and actions that are presented in his