Symbolism In The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.” Yann Martel, Life of Pi.(Goodreads) Edgar Allan Poe weaves common themes throughout all of his short stories; death, guilt, arrogance, and loss of sanity. All four of these themes are found in his tale, “The Black Cat”. The narrator of the story slowly turns from a soft, animal lover, to an insane murderer within a short amount of time. He is drawn to do, say, and act upon desires that well up inside him with seemingly no way to stop it. In “The Black Cat” Edgar Allan Poe uses narration and symbolism to convey the plunge into madness that leads to the deterioration of the narrator’s very life.
Poe uses narration, first, to portray the sink …show more content…
The most obvious symbol, is in the title of the story itself. The first black cat, Pluto, is described as beautiful, large, and sagacious. When people refer to a black cat, it is usually allured to as a bad omen, or bad luck. The narrator even discusses how his wife jokes about black cats being, “..witches in disguise” (719). He makes a deliberate effort, however, at two different times to point out that they were, “not serious”(719) and “not a little tinctured with superstition” (719). In basic human nature, when we repeat ourselves like that, especially in a first person narration, it would seem as though we are trying to convince ourselves of that, not the reader. I think that he was trying to make himself think that he didn’t believe in the myth. The next symbol dealt with the alcoholism he uses as an excuse often for doing the horrible deeds. The alcohol, I believe, is a symbol for inner turmoil in the narrator’s life. He uses it as a means to cover, and hide his true feelings and desires. When he finally kills Pluto, a fire consumes all his belongings. The narrator still refuses and tries to explain away the fire without believing in any superstition. Even when an image of the hanged cat appears on his house, he reasons it away by saying, “the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber”(721). He thinks the cat was thrown into the wall to wake him up! He even confesses that his reasoning was,”altogether to my conscience”(721). This means that he was only making himself feel better by trying to explain the image. Next comes the second cat. While the cat itself means nothing, the white patch starts a theme in the story. The narrator begins to conceive the idea that the patch is turning into the image of, “Gallows”(722). This

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