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The Tell-Tale Heart

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The Tell-Tale Heart
Analysis - Like the narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator of "The Black Cat" has questionable sanity. Near the beginning of the tale, the narrator says he would be "mad indeed" if he should expect a reader to believe the story, implying that has already been accused of madness One of Poe's darkest tales, "The Black Cat" includes his strongest denouncing of alcohol. The narrator's perverse actions are brought on by his alcoholism, a "disease" and "fiend" which also destroy his personality. Allusions - The use of the black cat evokes various superstitions, including the idea voiced by the narrator's wife that they are all witches in disguise. The titular cat is named Pluto after the Roman god of the Underworld.
Setting - As the …show more content…
Maybe what he sees is just a hallucination of a tormented mind. The markings of an adult cat surely would not change that much, unless maybe the pattern was not part of the animal's fur, but only a substance on its surface which, with time, could wear off and disappear (a substance such as plaster?). After all, the second cat is also missing an eye. Poe is very careful to avoid stating if it is the same eye of which Pluto was deprived. Are there really two cats in this story, or did Pluto (possibly "a witch in disguise") survive, and return for …show more content…
Even the narrator acknowledges the “wild” nature of the tale, attempting thereby to separate his mental condition from the events of the plot. The nature of the narrator's madness differs from that of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “The Black Cat” does not concern itself only with the self-contained nature of the narrator's mind. Rather, the narrator confesses an alcoholism that interferes with his grasp on reality and produces mood swings. Alcohol is, like the cat, an external agent that intrudes on the dynamics of the plot. The introduction of alcohol as a plot device is also significant because Edgar Allan Poe was an reputedly uncontrollable drunk throughout his lifetime. For many years, his biographers asserted that he died of alcohol poisoning in a gutter in Baltimore. More recent biographies insist that the exact cause of Poe's death cannot be determined. Regardless, it is certain that Poe suffered from the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption throughout his
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