Theme Of Perverseness In The Black Cat

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat,” the main character, other than the two cats highly featured in Poe’s story, is the unidentified narrator. The story is told in retrospective style by the narrator, according to the grapevine a man of means given his reference in the story to a servant who lives with him and his wife, and who the reader is led to believe is incarcerated and soon to be put to death for a crime to be expressed. The narrator in “The Black Cat” begins his story with a rejection of belief that is something but sane, stating “Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do not dream. But to-morrow I die and to-day I would unburden my soul.” Having learned the reader of his need to relieve his soul regarding the sequence of …show more content…

The discussion of perverseness is in the paragraph describing the murder of Pluto. The narrator asks “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination […] to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” The narrator suggests that this perverseness as an essential part of human nature. It’s what makes people break the law, just for the fun of breaking the law, even if they know they’ll get in trouble, even if they think the law is just. This, the narrator says, is why he killed Pluto. And if he hadn’t killed Pluto, the second cat wouldn’t have come to haunt him and force him to kill his wife. The narrator seems to be saying that he does know the difference between right and wrong, but that this perverse impulse “one of the primitive of the human heart” made him do it anyway. This could throw a wrench in the insanity defense, which depends on him being able to show that he doesn’t know the difference between right and

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