Edgar allan poe the black cat symbolism

"The Black Cat," one of Edgar Allan Poe's most memorable stories, is a classic example of the gothic literature genre that debuted in the Saturday Evening Post on August 19, 1843. Written in the form of a first-person narrative, Poe employed multiple themes of insanity, superstition, and alcoholism to impart a palpable sense of horror and foreboding to this tale, while at the same time, deftly advancing his plot and building his characters. It's no surprise that "The Black Cat" is often linked with "The Tell-Tale Heart," since both of Poe's stories share several disturbing plot devices including murder and damning messages from the grave—real or imagined.

The Black Cat Summary

The nameless protagonist/narrator begins his story by letting the readers know that he was once a nice, average man. He had a pleasant home, was married to a pleasant wife, and had an abiding love for animals. All that was to change, however, when he fell under the influence of demon alcohol. The first symptom of his descent into addiction and eventual madness manifests in his escalating maltreatment of the family pets. The only creature to escape the man's initial wrath is a beloved black cat named Pluto, but one night after a serious bout of heavy drinking, Pluto angers him for some minor infraction, and in a drunken fury, the man seizes the cat, which promptly bites him. The narrator retaliates by cutting out one of Pluto's eyes.

While the cat's wound eventually heals, the relationship between the man and his pet has been destroyed. Eventually, the narrator, filled with self-loathing, comes to detest the cat as a symbol of his own weakness, and in a moment of further insanity, hangs the poor creature by the neck from a tree beside the house where it's left to perish. Shortly thereafter, the house burns down. While the narrator, his wife, and a servant escape, the only thing left standing

Prior to the technological revolution in medicine and advancements in the art of embalming, the fear of being buried alive due to being misconstrued as dead was very real. As a result, stories of premature burial abound throughout literature and throughout Poe’s stories. The plot of “The Black Cat” puts a nice spin on the narrative device, but the concept of being buried alive also appears in “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Morella,” “Eleanora,” “Ligeia,” and “Berenice.” The premature burial of Roderick Usher’s sister drives the entire narrative of Poe’s story about the fall of that house; further, as if the appearance of this running motif were not obvious enough, there is the story that Poe titled “The Premature Burial.” Beyond the literal fear of this kind of death, premature burial takes on a symbolic meaning as the fear of being trapped in a kind of existential limbo. Outright death brings with it a kind of finality and release from the mortal world: burial alive, in contrast, condemns one to a kind of liminal space between the realms of the living and the dead.

The movement from obsession toward madness takes a particularly sadistic turn in “The Black Cat” when the narrator jabs a penknife into the cat and leaves it with only one eye. When the second cat shows up, it also is mysteriously missing one eye. Eyes are a symbol to which Poe returns again and again in various forms of expression in his stories. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it is the sound of the heart thumping away beneath the floorboard that eventually drives the narrator to guilt-ridden insanity, but the engine powering that drive is his obsessive belief that an old man is delivering a curse upon him through his Evil Eye. The eyes of the titular figure in “Ligeia” are the predominant symbol in that story, hiding the key to knowledge their dark and mysterious beauty. As a symbol, eyes—especially when contemplated from the perspective of a paranoid narrator—represent the kind of existential persecution