Edgar Allen Poes The Black Cat - Book Report/Review Example

In Edgar Allen Poe's short stories fantasy plays an integral part. As may be inferred from Elmer's analysis, Poe's stories are founded upon a perversion of reality and engage in the continued testing of the limits of reality. While the external environment within which his stories unfold are conventional, the stories themselves are not simply because they are told by invariably insane narrators who impose their highly fantastical interpretations of reality upon all events which occur within. "The Black Cat" subscribes to the aforementioned as a critical reading of this confessional/letter exposes the degree to which the protagonist is psychological incapable of perceiving objective reality and is trapped in a fantastical realm of impossibilities and improbabilities; a fantasy world within which cats are resurrected, exact vengeance and psychologically destroy men. A more discerning analysis of the story leads to the realisation that the narrator's guilt-ridden psyche forces him to mentally and psychologically detach himself from reality and enter into a nightmarish world which he, himself, has created. The narrator details how he grew up loving and respecting animals and married a woman of similar disposition. One night the narrator comes home drunk and maliciously attacks their pet cat, Pluto, gouging out one of its eyes with his pocketknife. Later, due to guilt at hurting the cat, the narrator hangs it from a tree in the back yard in an effort to damn himself. That night, the narrator's house burns to the ground. While no one was killed in the fire, the house was destroyed. On returning to the house the next day, the narrator observes an image, created by the fire on the only still-standing wall, of a large black cat with a rope around its neck. Subsequent to the fire, the narrator sees a large black cat reminiscent of Pluto, in a bar and takes the second cat home. The next morning, the narrator notices that this second cat is missing an eye, just like Pluto. Over time the narrator becomes suspicious, even fearful, of the cat. This culminates in the narrator trying to kill the cat with an axe and burying the axe in his wife's head instead, instantly killing her. In an attempt to conceal the murder, the narrator bricks his wife up in a wall in the cellar of the building they inhabit. When the police come searching for her, the narrator is given away by the howl of the still-living cat, which he unintentionally trapped inside the wall with his wife's corpse. The police, following the cat's cries, tear down the wall, and the man is arrested for his wife's murder. As amply evidenced in the preceding summary, the tale draws its impetus from the narrator's insanity. To accept the tale as narrated and told requires the exercise of Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief." To reject it is to acknowledge the narrator's insanity but to understand that he is not intentionally deluded his readers but is confessing that which he believes to be true. In the narrator's mind, and as induced by a psyche driven to the point of insanity by guilt, his narrative is accurate and precise. Importantly, he retains just enough remnants of sanity to recognize that few will accept his fantastical take and, thus, seeks to reassert his sanity by refusing to admit his instabilities and by trying to convince us of his sanity through his word choices and the details he elects to include in the narrative. First, the narrator seeks to prove his sanity by showing that he can distinguish between sane and insane tales. He starts his narrative by writing, "For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream" (320). By admitted that he knows the events he is about to relate will be questionable to his audiences' worldview, the narrator seeks to establish his own sanity. After all, if the narrator can admit the events are implausible, maybe even impossible, his rational mind must still be intact. Within the tale itself, the narrator ends up relating a series of events that, upon close examination, point to the narrator's psyche working continually to punish him for his first attack on Pluto. While this is certainly a horrible action, the connection between it and the ultimate murder of the narrator's wife is fantastical. Indeed, this is the point at which the narrator's madness begins to appear in the tale and fantasy dominates. The madness is apparent because the narrator blames the spirit of his murdered cat for the fire, and all subsequent occurrences, rather than place blame on more likely and plausible culprits. While the fire's origins are not discussed, and it is likely to have been accidental, it is equally likely that the narrator subconsciously started the fire, or at least made it very likely to occur. While the narrator's killing of Pluto damned him, in his eyes, that punishment would not be immediately apparent. Nothing outward in the narrator's life would change. Perhaps this lack of immediate punishment drove the narrator to seek further penalty, one that would not only punish him as he felt he deserved for hurting Pluto, but also one which would reflect his status as irredeemable sinner. The evidence of the narrator's madness comes through in his description of what he observes when he returns to the burnt down house the following day. "Only one wall remained standing in the house, an interior wall against which had rested the head of the narrator's bed" (323) - certainly a private and significant place. Madness is affirmed when the narrator insists that on the sole standing wall, the smoke and ashes had drawn "figure of the gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal's neck" (323). The seeming message from the cat, a claim of responsibility almost, is reinforced by ideas previously planted by the narrator in the reader's mind. Readers, however, cannot accept this claim, however, until they too merge fantasy with reality and, accordingly begin to see and believe the unthinkable and unbelievable. Proceeding from the above stated, and as argued in this essay, "The Black Cat," is a tale of fantasy-induced horror. The narrator's insanity, brought about by his senseless torture and subsequent murder of his pet cat, not to mention the murder of his wife, is evident throughout the story and, indeed, informs both his actions and his perceptions of them. Within the context of the stated, "The Black Cat," is a tale of the horror experienced when reality and fantasy intermingle. Bibliography Elmer, Jonathan. Reading at the Social Limit : Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Read More