Black Cat Essay
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In Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat", there are many examples of ironies to which we as readers may not be fully aware of. I have listed a few of these ironies that I thought were relevant in the story's plot and one, which I thought was the most significant. Ironies such as the narrator's upbringing as having the "docility and humanity of disposition" (102.13), and "having fondness for animals and the feeling of happiness when feeding and caressing them"(103.1-3), are only a few examples of situational ironies in this story. They are ironies because his action towards his house pets do not endorse the humanity the animals deserve to be given and the so-called fondness he has for animals has been recently altered to be that of cruelly and hideously maltreating them. There are many more ironies in the story, but the most crucial irony was that in the conclusion. The concluding irony, one that I found to be the most significant, is when the narrator finds the black cat "walled-in" with his wife's corpse. After his accidental but vicious attack on his wife with an ax, he wanted to conceal the corpse where no one would be able to witness his doings. To avoid public speculation he thought about how the "monks in the Middle Ages were recorded to have walled up their victims" (106.56) and so he then used the idea of the monks to cover up his wife's dead body. In finishing his task of plastering the wall after his wife, he awaits the presence of the black cat to slaughter it, but it was nowhere to be found or seen. To his misfortune, he conceals the cat along with his wife's corpse inside the wall and obliviously turns himself in to the authorities. This one, I think is most important because were it not for the concluding irony there would be no story. Since there are many more ironies in the story, it is this one that finalizes the story and one that initiated as well. The narrator is telling how this ordeal came about while awaiting his execution and to verbally recapture his then-life with his audiences to claim his sanity. While he reminisces, we as the reader can have an understanding of what he went through and think for a moment about what the black cat represents and if there really exists the black cat. Ironies besides the concluding one also helps thicken the plot in the story. We are given ironies such that I mentioned earlier in the essay and many more that help us understand and question the narrator's sanity. In the event of the narrator eye gouging one of Pluto's eyes, he said that he felt a "sentiment half of horror, half remorse, for the crime" (103.42-45). If his feelings were so remorseful, why didn't he stop torturing the poor animal? I think this one captures the essence of a dramatic irony, feelings of ambiguity he is experiencing and yet the narrator acts on confused notions when killing his cat. Another irony that dramatizes his obscure feelings towards his cat, Pluto, was when he noosed up his cat from the limb of a tree to severely cut oxygen from its system or rather to kill it, execution style. He "hung it with tears streaming from his eyes and with the bitterest remorse at his heart." "Hung it because he knew that it had loved him and because he felt it had given him no reason of offense- hung it because in doing so he was committing a sin" (104.19-21). Why then would the narrator act on impulses such as this one if his feelings were of the total opposite? Again a dramatic irony that leaves us, the readers to feel upset and to feel anger towards the narrator for having such deranged thoughts that only he can understand. Furthermore, through my interpretation of these ironies, it helps me to keep aware of the narrator's behavior throughout the story. His behavior is what defines irony such that, the narrator seems to be fully conscious of what he is feeling but is completely out of touch with reality and acts on different morals from that of his emotions. These ironies are just a few that I've mentioned that correlates to its concluding irony. There also seems to be the debate of the black cat, how the story's readers scrutinize it whether it does exist or not. It can be a symbol or can stand for something, to what it can stand for varies from reader to reader. Some may think that the black cat stands for something evil and that it only exists in the mind of the narrator. It can be a cause for an arguable debate and if so, one to which I'm not going to impose. I think there is a symbolic meaning to the black cat and I would think those who have read it would agree that it represents the narrator himself and what his character reveals about him. Why then...
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