the black cat edgar allan poe read online

Kenneth Silverman has offered a similar observation, but with more psychological suggestiveness, indicating that tales like 'The Black Cat' 'dramatize failures of various defenses, the protagonists' futile attempts to conceal from themselves and others what they feel' (209). Rea has observed about Montresor, the narrator of 'The Cask of Amontillado,' also seems applicable to the unnamed narrator of 'The Black Cat': Montresor reveals certain things to the reader, Rea states, 'in order to divert attention from the real reason for the crime' (57). In short, the retrospective narrator, who is actually two personsaethe man who killed his wife and the retrospective teller of the taleae is an untrustworthy and unreliable authority. , to do wrong for wrong's sake' (Poe 852) or his claim at the end of the tale that the cat, which he calls 'a hideous beast had seduced into murder' (859). , one of the primitive impulses of the human heart. Few critics seriously accept the narrator's own dubious rationalizations for the cruel murder either of his pet cat or of his wife, that being what he has done, so he confesses, he attributes to the 'spirit of PERVERSENESS. The narrator's motive for murdering his wife, as one might expect, has elicited much commentary and speculation from critics.

The intrinsic value of art, and the only 'true' art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.Published initially in the United States Saturday Post on 19 August 1843, Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat' remains one of his most mystifying and horrifying tales.

I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.

But my disease grew upon me - for what disease is like Alcohol!.

Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character - through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance - had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.

wife almost complete moral disintegration unforgivable and incorrigible sin the punishment of evil goodness.Symbols self-inflicted partial blindness to his own vision of moral goodness Superstitions My wife, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.Better experience the psychological change of the narrator.

Point of view-first-person narrative a condemned man an unreliable narrator

The black cat edgar allan poe read online