Insanity And Guilt In The Black Cat By Edgar Allen Poe

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.
The narrator of “The Black Cat” describes what he his telling to his readers as “mere household events”. When he describes these erratic events as everyday things, it shows us that he does not believe that these experiences are unusual. This shows the reader that he may have a mental illness showing that he does not recognize these incidents as wrong or strange.
The narrator says “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 peevish11—even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper”. He tells the reader that the disease is alcohol, which caused him to act poorly towards his cat. The narrator does tell the reader that the disease grew upon him, which signifies his alcoholism getting stronger as the story goes on. He is under the influence of

alcohol a lot throughout the story, which causes him to become paranoid. This shows that he ends up drinking so much that he is not able to make decisions that are correct.
Towards the end of the story, the narrator tells us that Pluto, the pet cat, is somehow out to get him.

“The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness”. While the narrator is walking down the stairs, the cat brushes by him, which ends up making him very angry. He ends up taking out an axe, and as he swings it at the pet his wife stops him. This makes him go insane and he ends up killing his wife, and stores her body behind a wall in his cellar. This proves that he is insane because he could not handle his pet cat harmlessly brushing past him on the stairs, and instead takes the life of his

wife.
Someone could argue that he is sane and therefore guilty because the narrator never does directly say that he has a mental illness. They could say that he just has a bad conscience that does not prevent him from making bad choices. The author writes the story basically implying that the narrator is insane even while he is talking about how innocent he is.
The author of “The Black Cat”, Edgar Allen Poe, displays the ideas of insanity in guilt through the personality of the narrator. The writer shows the reader that the narrator does wrong things, like killing his wife and hiding her body in the walls of a cellar, to reveal the idea of guilt. The narrator also addresses the idea that what he is telling the reader is only “mere household events”, which is the author communicating the idea of insanity to the reader.