Black Cat Theme Essay

At the time, the publication was using the temporary title United States Saturday Post.Like the narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator of "The Black Cat" has questionable sanity.Then, one day when the narrator and his wife are visiting the cellar in their new home, the cat gets under its master's feet and nearly trips him down the stairs.

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The only difference is a large white patch on the animal's chest.

The narrator takes it home, but soon begins to fear and loathe the creature, due to the fact that it amplifies his feeling of guilt.

Some time later, he finds a similar cat in a tavern.

It is the same size and color as the original and is even missing an eye.

His partiality for animals substitutes “the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man”.

Since the narrator's wife shares his love of animals, he likely thinks of her as another pet, seeing as he distrusts and dislikes humans.After a time, the white patch of fur begins to take shape and, much to the narrator's horror, forms the shape of the gallows.This terrifies and angers him more, and he avoids the cat whenever possible.One night, after coming home completely intoxicated, he believes the cat to be avoiding him.When he tries to seize it, the panicked cat bites the narrator, and in a fit of drunken rage he seizes the animal, pulls a pen-knife from his pocket, and deliberately gouges out the cat's eye.As he words it: "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!" "The Black Cat" was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.From that moment on, the cat flees in terror at his master's approach.At first, the narrator is remorseful and regrets his cruelty. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of perverseness." In another fit of drunken fury, the narrator takes the cat out in the garden one morning and ties a noose around its neck, hanging it from a tree where it dies.In the beginning of the tale, the narrator says the reader would be "mad indeed" if the reader should expect a reader to believe the story, implying that he has already been accused of madness.The extent to which the narrator claims to have loved his animals suggests mental instability in the form of having “too much of a good thing”.