Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat - Essay Example

At the same time, he says that he is not mad and not mistaken, which also makes the reader to conclude that he is lying. Hence, the author has dissected different aspects of the story like the events, characters and coincidences in the story, to find out the truth. According to Amper, the narrator challenges the readers (and the police) to find out the truth behind the murder by giving an unclear picture of different incidents in the story. The narrator has told the story as if he is putting a puzzle in front of the readers and asking them to put it together.

However, the attempt to suppress his strong guilt makes his subconscious mind to provide different cues to the reader. The cues make the readers doubt what the narrator is saying and helps to find the truth about the story. Amper says that the narrator’s subconscious guilt makes it difficult for his conscious mind to hide the truth completely. Hence, according to Amper, the cats are figments of the imagination which the narrator has invented to replace his wife. The author says that the black cat ‘Pluto’ and the second cat are the imaginary substitutes for his wife, used to hide the guilt behind the heinous nature of his crime.

Hence, according to Amper, the cats are nothing but fiction. . Moreover, two ‘rigorous’ searches made by police makes the author believe that the narrator is lying, as according to the author, it would take more than three days to make the police suspicious about the narrator’s story and conduct ‘rigorous’ search. Moreover, the condition of wife’s dead body convinces the reader that the narrator is lying as according to the author, a body cannot “decay greatly and clot with the gore” just in three days.

The subconscious “slips” of a tongue in narrator’s story makes the reader realize that the narrator is actually describing the murder of his wife by replacing wife with the cat. Moreover, Amper agrees with Daniel Hoffman, who was first in describing that the “narrator has substituted the cat for wife and wife for cat”. Hence, all the different fragments of the story like ‘apparition on the wall’, ‘the second cat’, ‘image of gallows’ etc., are the hallucinations and psychological elements which haunts the narrator due to the burden of the subconscious guilt of killing his wife.

However, according to the author, what really exposes the narrator’s lie is his description of the condition of his wife’s body. The author says that “the greatly decayed state of the corpse” is the highlight of the story and that’s when the reader realizes that the narrator has killed his wife and not the cat and that too, long time back. The author has concluded the article by appreciating Poe for writing a simple yet brilliant detective story that has a touch of psychological thrill to it.

Response The article ‘Untold Story: The Lying Narrator In “The Black Cat”’, written by Susan Amper, is a deep look at different