Rhetorical Analysis Of The Black Cat

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is narrated by a man dealing with an ill temper and alcoholism. The narrator who was once “noted for his docility and humanity” and cared for his pets transforms into a monster who kills his favorite cat, Pluto, his wife and another black cat that resembles Pluto. He tries to compromise his “fiendish” actions and hides his wife’s corpse, but at the end, his wife’s body is found in the walls while the black cat that resembled Pluto was sitting on top of the corpse buried together (3). Although “The Black Cat” centers around a series of terrific events caused by the unknown narrator, an examination of the insanity of the narrator shown in the first paragraph of the story raises the question of the reliability of story and its ambiguity.

Poe uses rhetorical devices such as paradox, diction, and irony to set the tone of the story while suggesting the instability of the narrator.

The story begins with a paradox, “For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief” (3).

This peculiar juxtaposition of “wild” and “homely” in the first line of the story triggers the reader’s curiosity of what “wild” and “homely” narration would be. This paradoxical phrase also foreshadows the “wild” behaviors of the narrator shown at his “home” as a murderer of his wife and cat. Paradox, “a statement that appears to be self-contradictory but may include a latent truth”, appears again when the narrator says “I was committing a sin…even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (6). By referring God as “Most Merciful” and “Most Terrible,” narrator demonstrates the unstable mind of his own with dealing with the sin that he has committed. These phrases create an ambiguous tone of the story which contributes to the way readers perceive the narrator and his behaviors as unusual and

insane.
As he intentionally used the word “homely” with “wild” in the paradox, Poe uses diction to enhance the stylistic components of the story for the readers to not only focus on the plot but also the characterization of the narrator. Since the story is told in first person perspective, the unstable stream of consciousness as he writes reflecting on the murders that he has committed hints the unreliability of the narrator. For example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “homely” has two contradicting definitions:
i) “Characteristic or suggestive of a home -cozy, comfortable.”
ii) “Especially of a person: of plain appearance; unattractive.”
In regards to the first definition, “homely” foreshadows the setting of the story (3). The suggestion of domestic setting appears again when he says “a series of mere household events” (3). However, the second definition suggests another aspect of looking at the “series of mere household events” – “unattractive”(3). The uncertainty of what definition Poe intended to use adds to the paradoxical and ambiguous tone of the story. Moreover, the narrator presents these events as “natural” and “mere” whereas he puts emphasis on how these events have “destroyed him” earlier in the paragraph (3). However, after reading the whole story, the use of these words is unexpected in describing the cruel murders that the narrator has committed. This diction present how the narrator does not feel any guilt for what he has done and doesn’t realize how serious the situation is as he compromises himself that these crimes were “very natural”(3).
Another figure of speech that Poe uses is irony. Irony is “a figure of speech in which a contrast or incongruity between expectations for a situation and what is reality.” The narrator states “Yet, mad am I not-and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events”(3). This seems ironic how the narrator claims that he is not mad, and the murders he has committed are a “series of mere household events” as he is in jail about to face death sentence the next day (3). It is also ironic when the narrator says that the others will not be so “excitable” as much as he is when he shares his story and will consider it “nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.” When a reader first reads the first paragraph, it seems as if the man is logical and we don’t know why he is going to die the next day. The irony is that the man is, in reality, in jail after committing a brutal crime which is “excitable” to him. Such use of irony adds to how the narrator lacks realization of the cruelty of his murders and that he is “mad”(3).
The lexical analysis of the first paragraph of the “Black Cat” shows Poe’s careful characterization of the narrator who has an unstable mentality which makes the readers wonder if any of the story told by the narrator is true or not.
Compiling these rhetorical devices and plot together, Poe created a form of the paragraph with parallelism and intentional sentence structures to foreground the way the narrator expresses his madness. When the narrator first describes the effect of these events in the first paragraph, he says “in their consequences; these events have terrified- have tortured – have destroyed me” (3). The narrator uses parallel structure to the prior sentence when he depicts the intensity of the moment when the police officers come to his house to investigate: “I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom and roamed easily to and fro” (13). The parallel phrases intensify what is going on inside the narrator’s mind at the time. Through three different verbs to describe a situation that he is in, the narrator creates a great tension as his madness grows. Parallelism is used to further assert the bizarre psychological state of the narrator and the possibility of everything that happens to be all in his head.
Repetition also creates parallelism and accentuates the psychotic behaviors of the narrator. For example, the narrator says “One intellect more calm, more logical and far less excitable than my own” and “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feeling of others” (3,4). The repetition of the word “more” escalates the absurd tone of the narrator and the intensity of his state of mind. Moreover, in claiming that he is not “mad” but logical, the narrator repeats the word “mad” (3). In addition to the repetition, the intentional sentence structures is used to emphasize the word “mad” like “Yet, mad am I not- and very surely do I not dream” (3). Such strong emphasis on the word “mad” raise the doubt about the narrator in his stability (3). It seems odd for a normal person to resist and emphasize the fact that he is not “mad” (3).