The Black Cat

In this story, the author convincingly and precisely describes the human tendency to do harm with no real motive. Poe states just the facts and does not question them in a moral sense. The story is written as an inner monologue of the storyteller.

Summary

The protagonist of this story was gentle and permissive as a child. He loved animals and took good care of them. He continued this behavior as he grew older. He married his soulmate and was very happy. Among his many pets, a black cat named Pluto was most attached to him.

However, the protagonist starts to drink and becomes a slave to alcohol. He begins to fall apart physically and mentally. While he's drunk, he starts to mistreat his wife and his pet, the black cat. In a rush of rage and hatred, he even gouges out one of the cat's eyes with a knife. Tormented by guilt, he cruelly hangs Pluto from a tree.

Then his troubles begin to pile up. His house burns down, his estate is ruined, and he becomes irritated by a one-eyed cat he finds in a bar one night. This new cat follows him constantly, serving as a living reminder of what he has done. Terrible nightmares start torturing him, both awake and asleep. His grumpiness turns into hatred towards everything and everyone.

His wife suffers greatly because she has to live next to him. When they are in the basement of an old building, he tries to kill the new cat with an axe, but his wife intervenes to stop him. In a fit of rage, he kills her instead. Instead of feeling sorry or desperate for what he has done, he begins to think of a way to get rid of her body. He decides to wall up the body in the basement and carefully makes the wall look like it did before. He goes looking for the black cat, his torturer, but cannot find him.

Four days after the murder, the police come and check every corner of the house but find nothing. In his arrogance, believing he won't be discovered, the protagonist knocks on the wall with a cane to show how firm it is. Then the unexpected happens: from behind the wall, as if from a grave, they hear sobbing that soon turns into screaming. When the police tear down the wall, they find the black cat above the head of the dead woman. The protagonist didn’t even realize he had walled the cat up with his wife.

Genre: short story

Time: 19th century

Characters: man and the black cat

Author: Edgar Allan Poe biography