The Correlation Between Alcoholism and Brutality Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat (1849), is a dark short story about a man who quickly turns violent after he begins drinking alcohol. In the story, the narrator (who not only loves animals, but also has many pets) impulsively cuts out his beloved cat’s (Pluto’s) eye. After this ghastly offense, the narrator gets more violent and ends up murdering his innocent wife, hiding her body in the wall, and getting caught by the police; which, as a result, causes him to go to prison and be hanged for his villainous crimes. This short story illustrates that alcohol often makes individuals violent and aggressive. Alcohol turns people brutal and hostile. A passage from The National Institute on Alcohol …show more content…
In the beginning of the story, the narrator is happy, caring, loves animals, and loves his wife. He says “...and never was so happy as when I was feeding and caressing him.” (Poe 1); the narrator talks about how his pet Pluto makes him very happy and he loves him, the narrator also says “Pluto- this was the cat’s name- was my favorite pet and playmate.” (Poe 1) this shows that the narrator of the story loved his cat, Pluto. Due to the fact that the narrator began drinking, the narrator turns evil, cruel, dark, and murderous. In the story the narrator states, “The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and most patient of sufferers.” (Poe 5) these lines from The Black Cat demonstrates that after he started drinking alcohol frequently he became abusive to his wife, saying that she was the most usual of sufferers; meaning that she was one who he usually took his anger out on. Also these lines from the story show that the narrator had turned more hateful and is also very impulsive when he became an
In the Black Cat the narrator has a strong dislike for his wife. Moreover, as time goes on the narrator develops more and more of a hate toward his wife. The narrator also hit his wife when he became intoxicated. “I grew day by day more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feeling of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, even
In his story, Poe is telling the tale of how he ended up in a jail cell waiting to be be put to death the following day for killing his wife, but he knows that he isn’t a bad person, but rather one influenced by alcohol,” 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. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul”(Poe 1). Here Poe is telling us that he is no criminal, he was unable to think straight under the influence of alcohol, and now he has done such a despicable thing that he now must candidly tell the story in order to understand what really happened. Later, Poe hints at an act of cruelty he enacted against his cat Pluto, “But my disease grew upon me -- for what disease is like alcohol! --and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish -- even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper”(Poe 2). Here Poe is being straightforward, he uses foreshadowing to warn the reader of the greatest of his tragedies, the one he commits against his beloved cat Pluto. His addiction to alcohol drove him to abuse even his favorite pet, and the injustice he brings towards Pluto ultimately drives him mad. Poe is
In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat” the narrator depicts his life as he is in his last days before his death sentence for the crimes he committed. In Poe’s violent story, many relationships are present such as his relationship with his pets, mostly his cat Pluto and his wife. Many critics say that Poe’s short story is an allegory for marriage and domesticity which can be proven through these relationships.
In the short story “The Black Cat”, Poe starts introducing the protagonist as a man in jail who is awaiting his death for the crime he has committed. The man used to always be joyful and loving, but with the power of alcohol, the man became abusive to his animals and wife. Eventually, he kills his cat and is being haunted by a similar yet more mysterious
Edgar Allan Poe for many years has confused people with his writings. Poe has put a very deep and analytical thought process in his writings. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are developed using techniques such as symbolism, imagery, and figurative language.
The narrator in “The Black Cat” first believes that the black cat is evil as his drinking problem worsens, he believes the cat is evil and causes him to do bad things to his wife and animals. The narrator blames the cat for his current state and even kills his beloved cat Pluto. In the story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe uses imagery and specific details to symbolize darkness and evil. The narrator was a happy man he like his animals, and loved his wife he got a cat named “Pluto” “He was very large and beautiful animal; he was black black all over and very intelligent”(Poe 1). Conclusion: In the short story “The Black Cat” “Edgar Allen Poe uses The Black cat as named pluto as a symbolic representation of darkness and
Furthermore, Poe’s plot development added much of the effect of shocking insanity to “The Black Cat.” To dream up such an intricate plot of perverseness, alcoholism, murders, fire, revival, and punishment is quite amazing. This story has almost any plot element you can imagine a horror story containing. Who could have guessed, at the beginning of the story, that narrator had killed his wife? The course of events in “The Black Cat’s” plot is shockingly insane by itself! Moreover, the words in “The Black Cat” were precisely chosen to contribute to Poe’s effect of shocking insanity. As the narrator pens these he creates a splendidly morbid picture of the plot. Perfectly selected, sometimes rare, and often dark, his words create just the atmosphere that he desired in the story.
A pattern in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” is the reliability and sanity of the narrator being deteriorated through the use of connotative language. Poe’s narrator is first-person, he communicated the sequence of events from his perspective to the reader. For a narrator to be unreliable, their personal bias must corrupt the accuracy of information being relayed. Connotative language encompasses the unspoken emotional implications and underlying contexts of a descriptive word. This connotative language pattern is used in reference to the cat on multiple occasions; the first time the narrator attacks his cat, upon realizing his second cat is beginning to resemble the first, and after he murders his wife. The pattern of increasing negative
In “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allen Poe scrutinizes the ideas of insanity and guilt. The narrator is unreliable because he acts as if he has mental illnesses and other various problems. He is a man who abuses alcohol and also has a cat that he believes is out to get him, though the animal has never done anything to him. In “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, The narrator is insane and therefore not guilty because he cannot control the choices he makes based on mental illness.
Have you ever red a scary story that made you shiver down your spine, well this man wrote them all the time, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was born on January 19, 1809 he died on October 7 1849. His life influenced his writing in ways like his addictions,Loved ones dying because of tuberculosis, finally His madness/ insanity.
“The Black Cat”, written by Edgar A. Poe, has been called “one of the most powerful of Poe’s stories” with a horrific element that just barely “stops short of the wavering line of disgust”. Originally published in 1843 in the United States Saturday Post, this Gothic tale is perhaps also one of Poe’s most extensively analyzed pieces. (Cambell33) Much diversity is seen in the interpretations offered. The black cats are variously conceptualized as symbolic of the narrator’s wife, manifesting the supernatural, representing the narrator’s “intemperance and lost docility”, and reflecting some rapidly diminishing noble facet of the tale-teller’s character or conscience. The narrator himself is described by various analysts as insane, a liar, and
The murder is discovered as the narrator unknowingly buried the second cat in with the corpse of his wife, the cat cries out when the police happen to be in the same place where the narrator buried his wife. In the “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allan Poe uses symbolism, irony, and similes to portray the theme of perverseness and to explain how every man has it and how easily one can become corrupted.
In “The Black Cat,” Poe makes sanity, or the lack thereof, an important element in the story. When the narrator writes of his experience, “his feeling for his wife was too weak to prevent his murdering her” (Poe, Masterplots 233). In the story, the narrator says he killed his cat, adopted another similar to the first, and when it tripped him, killed his wife as she tried to intervene. Reading the story, it is easy to see how the narrator slips into madness. For example, in the beginning of the story, the
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying and grotesque. “The Black Cat is one of the most powerful of Poe’s stories, and the horror stops short of the wavering line of disgust” (Quinn).
In "The Black Cat," the author, Edgar Allan Poe, uses a first person narrator who is portrayed as a maniac. Instead of having a loving life with his wife and pets, the narrator has a cynical attitude towards them due to his mental instability as well as the consumption of alcohol. The narrator is an alcoholic who takes out his own insecurities on his family. It can be very unfortunate and in some cases even disastrous to be mentally unstable. Things may take a turn for the worst when alcohol is involved, not only in the narrator's case, but in many other cases as well. Alcohol has numerous affects on people, some people may have positive affects while others, like the narrator in "The Black Cat," may have negative affects like causing physical and mental abuse to those he loved. The combination of the narrator's mental instability along with the consumption of alcohol caused the narrator to lose control of his mind as well as his actions leading him to the brink of insanity. Though the narrator is describing his story in hopes that the reader feels sympathy towards him, he tries to draw the attention to his abuse of alcohol to demonstrate the negative affects that it can take on your life as well as destroy it in the end.