The Black Cat Evil Essay

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Fourth, evil is morally objectionable behavior, which the moral plot of the literary confession criticizes and rejects. There are three apparent existences of evil in “The Black Cat”. Above all, evil is displayed as superstition in the tale. The sentence “In speaking of […]as withes in disguise” implies that the black magic regards the black cat as witch. In the tale, the black cat destroys the character completely, so the evil here is presented as superstition. Then, the second representation of evil is alcoholism. As the tale shows that “Our friendship lasted […] Fiend Intemperance had”, alcohol, which is another form presenting the evil, depraves the character of the narrator. Moreover, Christian myths of hell can also act as the form of evil. Christianity divided the world into three portions, which consist of heaven, earth, and hell. There is an example in the text can further indicate the point. The phrases “god”, “me”, and “Arch Fiend” in the sentence “But may god shield and …show more content…

The first unapparent form of evil is the spirit of the perverse, which shows the contradiction of human nature. One the one hand, the narrator in “The Black Cat” knows that his action is immoral and he must stop his atrocity. On the other hand, he continues his outrage under control. Therefore, the spirit of perverseness can stop the narrator from restoring his moral order. Another sophisticated kind of evil is a lexical layer or words scattered throughout the tale. For example, the paragraph “On the night […] thenceforward to despair” contains four progressive words, and they are “fire”, “flame”, “blazing”, and “conflagration”. In literature, “fire” often present as darkness and destructive. Although these four words convey the same idea, each word is more inexplicit than the previous one. Consequently, the gradually advancing in extent of vocabulary with specific meaning is an ingenious form of

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