Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe



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Edgar-Allen-Poe-Short-Stories-Unlocked
Short Story By Flannery OConnor
Poe plays with the idea of the power of a disturbed mind. The fire is
such a violent coincidence that it seems to have been caused by
some supernatural power like the narrator’s rage, or perhaps the
cat itself. The coincidences continue as the outline of the cat
appears in the only piece of the building not destroyed by the
flames. It is impossible to separate the disturbed vision of the
narrator and the reality, because we know his mind is guiltily
obsessed with the image of the cat.
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Page 47

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 rages
at this point. He tries desperately to explain what he sees with
rational thought, but his mind is already infected with superstition
and his explanations begin to sound far-fetched and somewhat
insane.
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 that
provoke illusions and hallucinations. By putting the narrator in this
setting, Poe introduces another level of mistrust in our intimacy
with him. How far can the narrator be trusted, when the arrival of
Pluto’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 of
this new cat coincidentally make him an exact replica of the
murdered Pluto. Now this animal presents the narrator with a
bigger challenge – an supernatural (or possibly imaginary) rival is
much more difficult to get rid of than areal one. The narrator now
battles 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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