The Black Cat Essay -- essays research papers fc

A Glimpse Into the World of The Black CatThose who have read any of Edgar Allan Poes short stories know that most of them ar ample of suspense and mystery and that they efflict a feeling of horror and shock upon the reader.Poe studies the mind, and is conscious of the abnormalities of his narrators and he does not condone the intellectual expedient through which they strive, only overly earnestly, to justify themselves. He enters the field of the starkly, almost clinically realistic investigation of men who, although they may feel uneasy about their mental states when their tension lets up, are too far gone to understand their mania, let alone to control it (Gargano 171). His stories usually have a horrible murder theme in which on that point is a obsessive narrator and they follow the development of the theme step by step with a realism that, barring with genius, might case ahistory from the twentieth-century psychiatry. This could not be presented more clearly than in The Blac k Cat. Those who may deny realism to Poe suffernot be very familiar with our daily newspapers, which sporadically carry true stories of murders committed under just abnormal psychological pressures as those described in The Black Cat (Buranelli 76). This story begins with the narrator ,who is about to be hung, confessing what he has done in some type ofrepention for his soul. The narrator step by step describes how he began drinking and then to neglect his dearly high-priced cat and his wife. One day when he is maddened by the actions of thecat, he cuts out its eye and later lands the cat by hanging it. After his signaling burns down and he has lost all he owned he finds a new cat resembling all to well the first. One day while workingwith his wife in the cellar he is nearly tripped down the stairs by the cat, he then picks up an axe and tries to kill it but his swing is intercepted by his wife and he instead strikes her and kills herinstantly. He conceals the body but then whe n the police come, he in a pestiferous manner taps the wall in which she is buried and reveals to the police what he has done(Poe). In Edgar Allan Poes The Black Cat, his use of point of view, symbolism, foreshadowing, and theme all combine with what he calls a series of mere household events to show how the narrator is driven into madness (Poe 1).Tol... ...uld have not got the full effect that Poe wastrying to convey, which is that just about anyone can be driven into madness and that the narrator in this story is not very different from any other person. Works CitedBuranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe Second Edition. Boston Twanyne Publishers, 1977. 76-77.Davidson, Edward H. Poe A Critical Study. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1957. 190.Gargano, James W. The Question of Poes Narrators. POE A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Regan. Englewood Cliffs Prentice Hall, 1967. 169-171.Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City Doubleday & Company, 1972.May, Ch arles E. Edgar Allan Poe A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston Twayne Publishers, 1991. 78.Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat. Ed. Martha Womack. n.page.online. profits 29 July. 1998. Available http//www.poedecoder.com./Qrisse/works/blackcat.html.Prinsky, Norman. The Black Cat. Masterplots II Short Story Series. Ed. Frank N. Magil. Vol. 1. Pasadena Salem Press, 1986. 231-34.Womack, Martha. Edgar Allan Poes The Black Cat. n.page.Online. Internet. 2 August 1998. Available http //www.poedecoder.com/essays/blackcat.