The narrator of "The Black Cat" tries to logically explain how it could have happened. The cat must have been thrown into the window when people saw the flames and gotten stuck to the recently plastered wall and been preserved thereby the compression of the other walls and the substance of the plaster. But though the narrator believes he has explained the incident, he still gets terribly paranoid about seeing the vision again. He gets an urge to find a replacement animal.
The battle in the narrator’s mind between delusion and reality ragesat this point. He tries desperately to explain what he sees withrational thought, but his mind is already infected with superstitionand his explanations begin to sound far-fetched and somewhatinsane.One day, in a den of disrepute, the narrator of "The Black Cat"
suddenly spots a cat atop a barrel of alcohol he’s been staring at. The cat is large and looks almost exactly like Pluto apart from a white patch on its breast. The narrator starts petting it and finds it very responsive to his touch. Soon, the cat is very attached to the narrator and won’t let him leave without him.
He
takes it home, and soon the cat becomes a favorite of the narrator’s wife, but, much to his surprise, the narrator finds a loathing growing within himself for the animal’s unwavering affection.
The den setting is filled with alcohol and other substances thatprovoke illusions and hallucinations. By putting the narrator in thissetting, Poe introduces another level of mistrust in our intimacywith him. How far can the narrator be trusted, when the arrival ofPluto’s double is a product of these mind-altering drugs and dark,shady atmosphere?The narrator of "The Black Cat" starts to avoid the creature,
partly out of this hatred but also from shame at the way he had treated his last cat. He also hates a particular coincidental feature of the cat that it too only has one eye, though this only endears the cat to his wife. As the narrator’s
loathing for the cat increases, so does the cat’s affection and it springs upon the narrator unawares, looking to be petted, attaching itself with its claws. The narrator, at these moments, wishes
he could destroy the animal, but stops himself because of the traumatic memory of Pluto but mostly because of his dread of the new cat.
Poe brings out his doppelganger technique again. The features ofthis new cat coincidentally make him an exact replica of themurdered Pluto. Now this animal presents the narrator with abigger challenge – an supernatural (or possibly imaginary) rival ismuch more difficult to get rid of than areal one. The narrator nowbattles with his own delusions as well as his violent moods.The narrator of "The Black Cat" tries to explain that this dread is not because of the apparent evil of the beast, but of the strange transformation of the patch of white on the cat’s breast into the shape of a gallows – it is merely a cat, yet it is his most haunting image, and has caused him somehow to be writing from this felon’s cell The image of the gallows terrifies the narrator. He mourns that such a beast can get the better of a manlike him, made in the image of a High
God Now he can get no rest, because the cat is allover him in the daytime and the nights are filled with bad dreams.
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