Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” might be his most grisly short story and certainly his most shocking.  It features a narrator with an acute drinking problem and a professed hatred for humanity and for animals too apparently.  One wonders whether Poe did not put at least some of himself into this character.  

Autobiographical? 

The story mirrors Poe’s own drinking problem, though it has also been interpreted as a kind of warning against drinking. Indeed, the narrator refers to alcoholism as a disease: “–for what disease is like Alcohol!”   Poe knows intimately the evil of excessive drinking–though obviously he never killed a cat or a person.  (To be clear, Poe is not crazy, Poe is not a character in his stories).   

With the misanthropy of the narrator and his declared hatred of all of humanity, one wonders if we couldn’t attribute this quality to Poe himself, who was not exactly an agreeable personality.

Unreliable Narrator 

The short story begins with a long-winded warning to the reader that he is not mad, as so many Poe short story narrators do.  This has the effect of calling into question his sanity, thus leading some to regard this as an unreliable narrator. “The Tell-Tale Heart” features a similarly unreliable narrator, who famously declares: 

“TRUE!--nervous–very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad?” 

Compare this to “The Black Cat’s opening: 

“Mad indeed would I be to expect [the reader’s belief], in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.” 

In that he acknowledges the unreality of the events in the narrative, one is almost tempted to give the narrator credence.  

The Perverse

The short story treats the theme of the perverse, an urge to do what we know we should not.  This feeling of the perverse is mixed with violence in many Poe short stories, such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the narrator kills the old man for no logical reason (the purported reason being the old man’s heart). 

The narrator poses the question: 

“Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” (29) 

In “The Black Cat” the reason offered for killing the Pluto is equally incomprehensible. But this theme of perverseness takes away any particular moral of the tale, as though the narrator gets his comeupance (which to be fair, he does) and some kind of cosmic justice.  Rather, it is violence and cruelty just for its aesthetic quality as gothic literature. Summary

One must keep in mind that there are two cruel deeds: the first is plucking out the cat’s eye, the second is hanging it. 

The truly perverse turn of events is when the narrator finds a new cat which reminds him of Pluto but for a patch of white on its chest; everything is going well: 

“When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favorite with my wife” (31). 

But perhaps because the cat liked him, the narrator starts to grow irritated with it.  This shows 

some level of dissatisfaction with himself, which in turn leads him to spurn the affection of others, even of cats. 

“For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me” (31).  

The story reflects both alcoholism and self-loathing that we might be tempted to attribute to the author. 

Suspiciously, the new black cat is also missing an eye, as did Pluto from when its owner plucked that eye out so cruelly.  It starts to become apparent that the cat itself has weaved itself into the narrator’s destiny as an act of karma—bad karma. 

There is a foreshadow, or perhaps a kind of spoiler, when the narrator indicates that he’s writing from a “felon’s cell” (32) and will be executed the next day, as he reveals in the opening paragraph.  From this, the reader can only speculate as to what new crime he might have committed, aside from hanging his cat and gouging its eye out. 

The shocking climax of the short story answers this question.  The second cat of the narrator seems to be an agent of karma, who according to the narrator, contrived for him to kill his wife as a way of settling accounts for his treatment of his first cat, Pluto.

The ensuing police investigation in which the body was hidden too well to be detected again recalls “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the body of the narrator’s victim was also successfully hidden but only the narrator’s conscience or paranoia gives him away.  Yet in the beginning of the search, as in the “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator feels cool and confident that the police will find nothing: 

“My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence” (35). 

But like the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he gives himself away in a bit of bravado.  

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