The Unreliable Narrator In The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

Proof of the Delusive Narrator

Few stories are able to enthrall a reader with fallacious information and still leave the narrator’s true state allusive. Even fewer unveil this technique to the extent “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe does, which emphasizes a vituperative character. Whether it be his or her mental state or condition, the reader has no dependence on the narrator’s point of view. This is deemed as reading from the perspective of an unreliable narrator. There are various types of unreliable narrators, each of them having distinct characteristics limiting them from supplying the reader with adequate or completely true information. In the short story, “The Black Cat,” Poe delineates the first person narrator as an insane man who has difficulty perceiving his actions as what they are, making him unreliable. These occurrences pose questions for the reader regarding the legitimacy of what the narrator says. Nevertheless, the man in whose perspective “The Black Cat” is told, is unreliable due to his lack of recognizing the severity of his actions, his questionable sanity, and his succeeding reactions from his doings which are startling to the reader. Initially, the narrator in

When he murders his wife, he decides that the best way to conceal the body is to wall it up in the cellar. Once he does this, he states that he “felt satisfied that all was right” with a great sense of triumph (Poe 12). This attitude towards a hideous crime is simply outrageous since it completely contradicts what the reader may believe. After the murder, the reader would suspect that things and people are negatively impacted. However, the narrator clearly displays the opposite by showing triumph in his violent behavior, and with his solution to concealing the body, these understandings collectively add on to his qualifications of being