Edgar Allan Poe And The Black Cat

“The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls”. Here is a classic Poe line. Dark and gloomy, thought having to be put in by the reader to understand why this line would send shivers down a someone’s spine, or surrounding a soul with sadness and a melancholy feeling. Poe has, time and time again, shown mastery over gothic techniques. Be it family curses, such as The House of Usher, or Unreliable Narrators, with the Black Cat, to the grotesque and gloom of a human’s mind and soul, seen in the Pit and the Pendulum. Poe is, and always will be, the best in the business and the master of gothic storytelling and poetry.

The Black Cat. “Mad I would be indeed to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.” An amazing example of a unreliable narrator. Every line he says and every event he
A great tale of a family curse. “He admitted, however, although with great hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin...a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth.” Being his only other living relative, and being the cause of his gloom, along with other details from the story, it is very safe to assume this is a family curse. A few moments after stating this, the Sister (Lady Madeline) “died.” After this the family curse appeared to affect Roderick (Of the House of Usher, Brother of Lady Madeline) much more. Everything he did was with a sense of doom and gloom around him. Painting was a sad and arduous task. Music was worse, pulling more darkness and gloom out of Roderick as he made it. Eventually, Roderick began to go insane it seemed. And, unbeknownst to the reader, Lady Madeline was alive the whole time and Roderick just buried her alive. Our Narrator runs out of the house upon hearing this, and the House of Usher, along with the bloodline of it, crumbles and