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Edgar Allan Poe author analysis
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The Black Cat
“The Black Cat,” short story from Edgar Alan Poe, has a few characters and many points of view that probably provide the most important elements in this short story. Therefore, the examination of the conflicts of the protagonists in Edgar Allan Poe’s description plays an important part with the objective of understand this short story. This paper’s objective is to analyze the significance of the characteristics of the protagonist.
According to the American romanticist writer Edgar Allen Poe, the story of “The Black Cat” is a realistic explanation of the dark nature of the human mind. Allen’s short story leaves the readers attracted to this work mainly because Allan Poe mixes the sentiments of a mysterious narrator. Likewise, the author includes description of social problems as alcoholism, murder, and perversity.
This short story is Poe’s domestic violence and guilt. The author begins to narrate the story having a kindly temperament and bringing memories about the many pets that he used to have. This portrays his love for animals, and how that love resulted in the acceptance of his parents who provided him with many pets. In addition, the author shares his wife’s loves for pets. Allan Poe says, “I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.”
However, after the narrator gets married and time passes, his addiction to liquor develops a drastic transformation to his personality. The narrator points put that his abuse of alcohol made him to lose the control of his senses and awake his h...
... middle of paper ...
...ce of the alcohol; he acted violently, and could not control himself.
Consequently, from the short story analysis we could conclude the author portrays the protagonist as presenting two sides of him; the negative attitudes the narrator showed under the influence of alcohol and the positive attitudes while he was sober. Allan Poe’s technique applied in the lecture has the purpose of reaching society and help people to understand human nature. The author described multiple conflicts throughout the story that create multiple points of view.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Gen. ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol. A. New York: Norton, 2012. 718-724. Print.
May, Charles E. "Edgar Allan Poe." Critical Survey Of Mystery & Detective Fiction, Revised Edition (2008): 1-5. Literary Reference Center. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.
Edgar Allen Poe is the author of many great pieces of literature. He uses his narrators to explain situations that are going on in their life. The narrators of "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Black Cat" demonstrate their love for mans inhumanity to man and animals through horrific murders.
Poe carefully details the most brutal scenes of his stories, a quality shared by many of his works. Within “The Black Cat,” three situations stand to illustrate Poe’s message: when the narrator stabs out Pluto’s eye, when the narrator hangs Pluto, and when the narrator murders his wife. Before the first violent act described in the story, the narrator is known to be a drunkard who abused his wife. No matter how despicable this may be, he is still a somewhat ordinary man. Nothing majorly sets him apart from any another, relating him to the common man. However, his affinity towards alcohol, led to “the fury of a demon” (2) that came over him as he “grasped the poor beast by the throat” (2) and proceeded to “cut one of its eyes from the socket.” (2) Poe’s gruesome description of the narrator as a destructive demon, one who was awakened by alcohol, connects his behavior to the common working-class man. Alcohol is a legal drug that can be obtained by many, and when consumed in excess leads to the uncontrollable madness that ensued. The descriptions of the act plants fear into the hearts of the readers, especially those who have consumed alcohol, of ever becoming such a
The Black Cat is a short story written in the first person. The narrator, a man, who never gives his name is already in prison and awaiting death from the onset of the story. He tells us the story of how he went from being a gentlemen and a loving husband to a murderer. First, he tells us about his cat, Pluto, and how he gauged one of its eyes out in an alcohol fueled rage He eventually kills his cat simply because it had loved him. In a weird twist, the narrator finds another cat that looks very much like Pluto. At first he was smitten with the cat, but slowly began to feel an immense hatred for the creature. In a fit of rage he tries killing the cat with an axe. His wife intervenes, and in turn, she is the one who receives the death blow to the head. He tries hiding his deed, but the cat ends up giving him away when the police come calling.
Edgar Allan Poe is one of America’s most celebrated classical authors, known for his unique dealings within the horror genre. Poe was a master at utilizing literary devices such as point of view and setting to enhance the mood and plot of his stories leading to his widespread appeal that remains intact to this day. His mastery of aforementioned devices is evident in two of his shorter works “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado”.
Redfield, J. S. "The Genius of Poe." Foreword. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. A.C. Armstrong & Son.
Literature. Gen. ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol. B. New York: Norton, 2012. 256-69. Print.
Edgar Allan Poe was an excellent horror, suspense, and mystery writer of the eighteenth century. His use of literary devices and different literary techniques makes this writer important to American literature. This paper will show how Edgar Allan Poe has made an impact on Society and American literature as well as how Edgar Allan Poe developed the short story. I will also discuss and analyze some of his works and techniques he uses in his short stories and poems.
" Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales. ED. William L. Howarth, b. 1875. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. 94. - 102. - 102.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "A Cask of Amontillado." Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Orlando: Harcourt, 1997. 209-14.
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print.
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.
This short story easily achieved the effect that Poe was looking for through the use of description of setting, symbolism, plot development, diverse word choice, and detailed character development. In most cases, the setting is usually indelible to a story, but “The Black Cat” relies little on this element. This tale could have occurred anywhere and can be placed in any era. This makes the setting the weakest element of “The Black Cat.”
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).
for dark, mysterious, and bizarre works of fiction. His works sometimes reflected his life experiences and hardships he tried to overcome. Examples of the troubles in his life include alcoholism, having his works rejected over and over, being broke, and losing his family, even his beloved wife to tuberculosis. There is no wonder why his works are so dark and evil, they were taken from his life. A theme is defined as the major or central idea of a work. Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat”, contains six major themes that are discussed in this paper. They include the home, violence, drugs and alcohol, freedom and confinement, justice and judgement, and transformation.
Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale, "The Black Cat," is a disturbing story that delves into the contrasts between reality and fantasy, insanity and logic, and life and death. To decipher one distinct meaning presented in this story undermines the brilliance of Poe's writing. Multiple meanings can be derived from "The Black Cat," which lends itself perfectly to many approaches of critical interpretation.