daaload.blogg.se - The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

Anti-Alcohol Aesop: Alcohol addiction turns the narrator from a loving husband and diligent pet owner to a raving, violent drunk.

The Alcoholic: The narrator delights in drinking heavily most of the story he spends in a cantankerous, foul mood.

I had walled up the tropes within the tomb! Was adapted for film as one of the segments in Tales of Terror. Nevertheless, it is still respected and admired by readers and teachers alike. Some scholars liken it to a mash-up between The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart. It isn't held in as such high regard as some of his more infamous works. This is one of Poe's more violent stories, a little shocking considering he loved cats himself. The man accidentally walled up the cat with his wife. Opening it up, the find the wife's body with the cat perched on her head. However, right when the police are about to leave, they hear a yowling coming from the walls. When the police come to investigate, he's more than happy to realize that the cat seems to have vanished.

He hides her body in the walls of the house. It torments and tries to kill him several times, and the man realizes with horror the white fur is starting to take the shape of the gallows.Įnraged, the man takes an axe and tries to kill the creature, but is stopped by his wife, whom he kills instead. The man takes the cat home with him, but soon grows to hate it. Some time later, the man runs across another cat, which is exactly the same size and shape as Pluto (it's even missing an eye), the only difference being this one has a patch of white on its chest. That night, his house mysteriously catches fire, and imprinted on the wall in ash is the image of the cat hung from the tree. Frustrated and angry, the man takes Pluto and hangs him from a tree in the garden.

In a panic, Pluto bites the man, who in turn gouges out one of his eyes with a knife.įrom then on, the cat flees in terror at the sight of his master. Coming home one night, he believes Pluto is avoiding him, so he snatches him up. The man and his wife live happily and take good care of their animals, until one day the man suddenly turns to the bottle, eventually becoming a violent alcoholic. He and his wife used to keep many pets, but his favorite of them all was a friendly black cat named Pluto. The man says he used to be a fond lover of animals. He explains he doesn't expect us to believe anything we're about to hear from him. We open the story with our narrator days away from being hanged for the brutal murder of his wife. "The Black Cat" is one of Edgar Allan Poe's more famous short stories, first published in the August 1843 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. " Yet mad I am not.and very surely I do not dream."