When he tries to seize it, the panicked cat bites the narrator, and in a fit of drunken rage he seizes the animal, pulls a pen-knife from his pocket, and deliberately gouges out the cat's eye.įrom that moment on, the cat flees in terror at his master's approach. One night, after coming home completely intoxicated, he believes the cat to be avoiding him. Their mutual friendship lasts for several years until the narrator becomes an alcoholic.

This cat is especially fond of the narrator and vice versa. The narrator tells us that from an early age he has loved animals he and his wife have many pets, including a large, beautiful black cat (as described by the narrator) named Pluto. He is a condemned man at the outset of the story. The story is presented as a first-person narrative using an unnamed unreliable narrator. 'The Black Cat', which also features questions of sanity versus insanity, is Poe's strongest warning against the dangers of alcoholism. In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime and believes himself unassailable, but eventually breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a nagging reminder of his guilt.

The story is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's ' The Tell-Tale Heart'. The police soon come and, after the narrator's tapping on the wall is met with a shrieking sound, they find not only the wife's corpse but also the black cat that had been accidentally walled in with the body and alerted them with its cry. He conceals the body behind a brick wall in his basement. He attempts to kill the cat with an axe but his wife stops him instead, the narrator murders his wife. He soon finds another black cat, similar to the first except for a white mark on its chest, but he soon develops a hatred for it as well. The home burns down but one remaining wall shows a burned outline of a cat hanging from a noose. His favorite, a pet black cat, bites him one night and the narrator punishes it by cutting its eye out and then hanging it from a tree.

In the story, an unnamed narrator has a strong affection for pets until he perversely turns to abusing them. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. ' The Black Cat' is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Early 20th-century illustration by Byam Shaw

The black cat 1843