UNIVERSITI UTARA MALAYSIA

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Literary Analysis of Edgar Allan Poes The Black Cat

NURUDDIN ABDUL AZIZ

S816655
30 DECEMBER 2014

The writings of Edgar Allan Poe are always somewhat associated with murderers,
madmen, and mysteries. In many of his poems and tales, the reader is often forced to take the
role of the detective, since Poe usually employs unreliable narrators to present his macabre and
dark narratives. In The Cask of Amontillado, the narrator, Montresor, entombs his friend
Fortunato alive within the catacombs of his palace in retribution for insults and injuries (Poe,
1846). It is not specified as to what extent these insults and injuries were; what makes it an
intriguing read is trying to figure out what really drives Montresor to plot his friends murder.
The Black Cat is also another short story by Poe which deals with the theme of
murder. Unlike The Cask of Amontillado, however, this one includes the themes of guilt and
madness. Another Poe tale that explores these themes is The Tell-Tale Heart (Poe, 1843). Like
many of Poes tales, The Black Cat is told from a first-person point of view. Furthermore, the
story is narrated by an unreliable narrator. The narrators motives in the story will be examined
further in this analysis.
The story begins with the narrator sitting in his prison cell, writing the story
behind his crime and why he did it. He then reveals that he is condemned to death and that he is
actually going to be hung in the gallows the next day. The narrator then proceeds to provide a
backstory to his life. He says he was a kind-hearted person since childhood, often to the extent
that he was teased by his friends about it while growing up. Apart from being kind, he also loves
animals. His parents had many pets, and that affection towards animals lasted until adulthood.
His favorite pet is a big, intelligent and affectionate black cat named Pluto. It is this cat which
would prove to be a central character in this tale due to its relationship with its master.
Our narrator is married, and his wife loves animals too. Their home is filled
with pets, with Pluto being one of them. The narrator mentions that his wife is a kind person as

well and also shows love and compassion to the pets. The plot starts to transition into the conflict
stage when it is revealed that the narrator is an alcoholic. Poe personifies his alcoholism as The
Fiend Intemperance, which could symbolize an amalgamation of all his personal demons due to
the drink. His bouts of drunken rage usually result in rough language and physical violence
towards his wife who apparently remains patient with him throughout the whole ordeal.
His aggression extends towards his pets as well, although Pluto is initially
spared any ill treatment. Eventually he commits an act of violence towards his most loved pet
and it is quite brutal. After coming home drunk one night, the narrator thinks that the cat is
avoiding him. Feeling annoyed by this, he tries to seize the cat but it bites him in shock. The
narrator reacts furiously towards this and in a fit of rage, gouges out one of Plutos eyes with a
pen-knife. The gradual change of the narrators victims of violence, from his wife to Pluto, is a
symbolism of his deteriorating moral and mental state caused by heavy drinking.
Not long after the eye-gouging incident, the narrator gets another violent
impulse and decides to kill the cat. He takes the cat, hangs a noose around its neck and hangs it
on a tree in his garden. Back to the present, the narrator reveals that he committed that foul
action exactly because he knew that is was wrong. He knew that the cat had loved him as he had
loved it. The cat had not done anything to cause major damage to the narrator. The following is
an excerpt from the story:
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 given 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.
(Poe, 1850)
It is here in his cell that he offers his viewpoints about the relationship between
the nature of Man and evil.
That same night, his house burns down in a massive fire and only him, his wife,
and his servant survive. The next morning he visits the site of his house and discovers a massive
image of cat with a noose around its neck burnt into one of the walls. At first he was amazed and
terrified but later deduces that one of his neighbors had thrown the cat into his room to wake him
up when the fire started. Thats how the image got on the wall he believes. Over the course of the
next few months the narrator starts to miss the cat, and hopes to come across a similar cat in the
bars he frequents to replace Pluto.
One night during a session of heavy drinking the narrator notices a cat. He was
surprised to discover that it was a large black cat that eerily resembles his old companion Pluto.
The creature takes an immediate liking to him upon being patted and caressed; the narrator feels
the same towards the cat and offers to buy him from the landlord. The landlord tells him that the
cat was never seen before. As the narrator goes home, the cat follows him and is instantly a
favorite with his wife.
The narrator notices that unlike Pluto who was all black, this new cat has a white
patch on its breast. But then just like Pluto, this cat is also missing an eye. This causes feelings of
hatred, anger, and even dread to engulf the narrator whenever this new companion is near. As
these feelings towards the cat grow, the cat seems to cozy up to the narrator even more. It follows

him around everywhere; it would crouch beneath him when he sat, and rest upon his knees. The
narrator admits to wanting to kill this cat as well, but the bad memories of his actions towards
Pluto stops him from doing so.
The already fragile mental state of the narrator is explored again through his
relationship with this new cat. His wife had called his attention towards the white patch on the
cats breast before, but to the narrator the undefined patch slowly and slowly starts to take the
shape of the gallows further reminding him of his brute act of hanging Pluto. He mentions that
the new cat would not leave him alone. The narrators guilt is manifested in the form of this cat;
the burden of guilt caused by his terrible sin weighs heavily upon him. It is represented literally
when the narrator wakes up from a nightmare to discover that the cat is resting on his face.
the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams
of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight
an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off incumbent eternally upon
my heart!
(Poe, 1850)
Poe uses the capitalized Night-Mare to describe the terror the narrator feels
whenever the cat is near. There is a myth which describes the Night-Mare as a demonic creature
that tramples on people in their sleep. After the Mare has done the deed, the victim will feel an
unexplained sense of danger or fear or dread. Poe often includes supernatural elements in his
tales, with The Masque of The Red Death as an example (1842).
After this Night-Mare incident, the narrator claims that his humanity has
deteriorated to the point where he has none. He starts to hate everything around him and his

violent tempers has increased with his wife being his most frequent victim. This culminates in
the brutal murder of his wife. One day he and his wife go down to the cellar and the cat startles
him. In a fit of rage, he picks up an axe and attempts to kill the cat with a blow. His wife stops
him, and this angers him even more so he buries the axe in her brain.
Immediately after his wife drops dead, the narrator does not mourn over her
regretting what he had just done, but examines different schemes to hide or dispose of the body.
He decides to wall her up within the confines of the cellar (Poe has wrote about this method
before in The Cask of Amontillado, only this time the victim is already dead). The narrator
aims to kill the cat next, but it is nowhere to be found.
Right after the death of his wife and the disappearance of the cat, the narrator is
able to finally sleep in peace. He feels little guilt and is extremely happy, more so at the absence
of his chief tormentor, the cat with the white patch. On the fourth day since the murder, the
police come to his house to investigate his wifes disappearance. Confident of his cover-up, the
narrator happily invites the police into his house for them search. He is so confident that he even
knocks the wall where he had hidden his wifes body.
To his shock, a noise comes from behind the wall after the knock. It sounds like a
wail, or a child crying. It sounds horrific yet victorious. The police take action by tearing the wall
down and they discover the wifes rotting body inside there. The narrator immediately spots a
creature sitting on top of his wifes head. It is none other than the cat with one eye and the white
patch of its chest, whose presence drove the narrator to murder and whose cry got the man
caught and sentenced to death.

Edgar Allan Poes stories are often studies of human emotion. This particular
story is the study of guilt, as well as depression, alcoholism, and madness. From the narrators
retelling of what happened, it can be said that as the story progress, he is slowly descending into
madness which is partly influenced by his alcoholism. His guilt from killing Pluto also plays a
part in his eventual murderous state. Contrasting the narrator with the one from The Tell-Tale
Heart, the latter can be said to experience extreme guilt after committing the murder of another
human being, whereas the former does not. After killing his wife, the narrator from The Black
Cat feels no remorse. Instead he feels happy at being able to sleep again since the new cat has
also disappeared.
The narrator in The Black Cat, speaking to the reader at the beginning of the
story, is consigned to his fate at the noose. Upon reading the story, readers can discover that it is
because he feels guilty of killing Pluto and not his wife. Perhaps he accepts this sentence as he
himself had carried it out on his favorite pet. This story can also be interpreted as a cautionary
tale about the dangers of alcoholism. The narrator says it himself: for what disease is like
Alcohol!. From a kind-hearted, animal-loving person he is transformed for the worse by the
bottle and he eventually commits the ultimate sin: murder.

References
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat (reprint), The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850),
1:281-290

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Cask of Amontillado (Text-02), Godeys Ladys Book (vol. XXXIII, no.
5), November 1846, 33:216-218

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart (Text-02), Pioneer, January 1843, 1:29-31