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Theme Of Karma In The Black Cat

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” the author uses karma as the theme of his story, as a result, later in the story he has to face the consequences. As the story unfolds, so does the theme, karma. Karma is a widely believed Buddhist Belief that a wide range of people have faith in. Karma implies that a person who does good deeds, will be rewarded with a better life in their next incarnation. Unjust acts committed lead to worse living conditions in their next life. This story uses an adaptation of that belief, and that is that horrid, unjust acts, like those committed by the narrator of the story, will not go unpunished forever. With each unjust deed that the narrator commits, an action of great consequence soon follows. This is shown when he hills the cat “One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; -- hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; -- hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had …show more content…

en me no reason of offence; -- hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin -- a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it -- if such a thing were possible -- even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.” And then later in the story another cat with white gallows on its chest is the reason that

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In this instance, it is clear that the protagonist is damned. By hanging and maiming animals, then later having his house burned down, the protagonist is shown to not be getting away with his sins. The burned house was found to have a burn mark of “a rope about [a cat’s] neck” (Poe 61), showing the reader that the man did one “get one over on God” and that God did truly see that that man is sinning and is not approved of. Following the omen from God, the man reflects on his mistakes and has his guilt keep him awake at night, Although this is a sign of redemption, this man is not feeling guilty for the right reasons, simply, the man is guilty for being caught, not the action itself. The man does not learn his lesson and continues to sin by being filled with “rage, more than demonical” (Poe 63), which causes him to kill his wife.

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The following night after the narrator kills the cat, the house catches on fire and the next day the narrator comes back to the house to see the ruins and came to see a group of people around a strange bas relief on the wall. The narrator was terrified when he saw what the bas relief was and the narrator writes, “There had been a rope about the animal’s neck” (Poe 3).

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It is also an unusual situation, because in the story, after he hanged the cat and went to sleep, his house suddenly burns out of nowhere (“I was aroused…” | Paragraph 10), and the members of the household, including the man, successfully escaped, and pluto, the cat he hanged, has resurrected into another black cat (“It was a black

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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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