WRITER.

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

Spoilers!

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe is one of several short stories he has written where the main character is convinced he is not mad or dreaming, but is clearly an unreliable narrator.

The narrator claims to be an animal lover, having birds, a dog and a cat, and even a small monkey. But for some reason any being who shows him affection drives him to irritation, even murderous intent. The opposite is also true – if the animal has the common sense to avoid him, he gets angry too. In my opinion, you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat animals. And he reveals himself to be a cruel, dangerous man.

This tendency toward violence is first shown when he gouges out his cat’s eye. Yeah, seriously. I think he tries to make us feel bad for him, because in the next part he explains that he drowns his guilt in alcohol. It makes him sad that the cat – Pluto is his name – now keeps his distance. But eventually even this rouses his ire, and he hangs the cat, with tears in his eyes, because even while he is murdering it, he knows how much the cat loved him.

Karma seems to finally rear its head and he loses his wealth one night in a fire, and when he returns to the ruins of his home later on, he sees the silhouette of the cat. He tries unsuccessfully to rationalize how this happened, believing it possible that a neighbor threw the hung cat through the window to wake him during the fire. It isn’t convincing, and it is much more likely that this is Poe’s way of showing divine retribution.

I mean really, what neighbor would think, hey, there’s a fire, let’s throw a dead cat into the conflagration to act like a bizarre fire alarm. In this day, I think it would be more likely that the narrator would be turned in for animal abuse when the dead cat was discovered.

It is my opinion that the mark of the cat on the wall was a hallucination caused by his own guilt.

What’s strange is that afterwards he decides to find a cat that looks similar to the one he killed because he misses it. Soon he finds one that looks close to Pluto’s coloring, except for a white patch on its chest.

You can guess what happens next. The new cat shows affection, which sets the whole cycle in motion again. This time he tries to kill it with an axe, and when his wife tries to stop him, he buries the axe in her head. Afterwards he hides her body behind a wall.

What a terrible mistake, to marry a man like the narrator. I wonder how well his violent tendencies were hidden from her. I suspect he would have no qualms about being as abusive to her as to his animals.

Like the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, he shows great overconfidence when the authorities show up, making a big show of being innocent. But his plan is thwarted when there is a meow behind the wall.

He accidentally walled the cat in with his dead wife! Then the wall is taken down and all is revealed, and there is justice. I think this is more satisfying then in some of Poe’s stories where the villain gets away with it. Especially in this one, I appreciate that he got what he deserved.

Have you read this short story? Share your thoughts below!