Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat: Substance Abuse

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Substance abuse plays a role in more than one of Poe's works. In the black cat alcohol drives the narrator to rip out his cats eye with with a pen and then hang the cat in guilt of what he had done. The narrator was a kind hearted man who loved animals and would do nothing to hurt them until he started to drink. He became an angrier person, always getting enraged with the people and creatures around him and his personality changed for the worse. Substance abuse changed him and drove him to be a different person than he really was. After killing the cat he felt little to no remorse for the deed he had committed and went back to his drinking and partying.Eventually his drinking led him to kill his wife, substance abuse changed him into a cold hearted man who could rationalize killing his wife and getting away with it.
Substance abuse affects the entire body, in The Black Cat it affects the narrators personality and his mood but alcohol can also have physical affects on the body. From the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, they state that alcohol can interfere with your brains communication pathways, and can also affects the way your brain works and looks in the long run. They state also along with what happens to the brain that it can disrupt mood and behavior, make it harder to think clear and move with coordinating skills. We can see how this applies to our narrator, he becomes angry and moody. He is thoughtless and doesn't care about his actions changing him from a caring, delightful human being to someone who could murder and sleep soundly through the night.

This doesn't necessarily directly apply to our character in the story but in the long run substance abuse with alcohol can lead to heart problems, su...

... middle of paper ...

...alize doing this to a person. Substance abuse took him from a kind person to angry drunk. He compares in almost all of the ways to a typical substance abuser, and it deteriorates him into a murderous person with no remorse or guilt for what he did.

Works Cited

"Alcohol Facilitates Aggression." About.com Alcoholism. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. . (tags: none | edit tags)
"Alcohol's Effects on the Body." National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. . (tags: none | edit tags) staff, Mayo. "Definition." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 9 Aug. 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. . (tags: none | edit tags)

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