Insanity In Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat

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This essay is written to represent and defend the narrator in Edgar Allen Poe’s horror story, The Black Cat. While sitting in his cell shortly before his execution for his wife’s murder, he has written a story of his crimes. Upon a closer look into the story, it is obvious his crimes are due to an uncontrollable urge and a psychological transformation leading to his demise. His story ended when the spirit of “perverseness” irrevocably over threw his mind. “The unfathomable longing of the [narrator’s] soul” to commit violence means that he could not control himself when he murdered his wife and is therefore not guilty by reason of insanity.
There are numerous examples to support the narrator not being able to control himself at the time of his wife’s murder. At the beginning …show more content…
As a substitute for treatment he uses alcohol, which makes his mental illness worse. The narrator describes the years before the first Pluto incident as a “radical alteration of his temperament” due to “the fiend Intemperance.” After long years of alcoholism and depression, the narrator finally gave in to his to his mental illness. The “fury of a demon instantly possessed” him and caused him to stab and disfigure Pluto’s eye. Shortly After the incident, the narrator was taken over by the spirit of perverseness and was unsure of whether he still had a soul or if he was just being controlled by human instinct. He describes his illness as an “unfathomable longing of the soul” to do violence.
Soon the narrator gave into his strong urges and committed violence towards his cat. These acts add to prior evidence of his insanity. He also continued to be obsessed and haunted by the cat even after its death. The narrator blamed his new replacement cat for being an “insufferable woe” and after what felt like days and nights of horrible torment and “dreams of unutterable fear” the good within him gave in to
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