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The Black Cat

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The Black Cat
The Black Cat

How is it that a man, loving his cat and wife so much ends up killing them due to alcoholism? Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “ The Black Cat ” talks about how the narrator with no name mentioned, over the years becomes moody and irritable due to alcohol. Poe reveals how the use of alcohol can change and control our way of thinking also what we attend to do at that moment. A decent man that loved animals had a variety of pets living in his household. As he says that he spent most of the time with them “ and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.” He got married at a young age with a young woman that also loved pets. They had birds, a gold-fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.
His wife didn’t like the black cat so much “ which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.” Pluto is the cat’s name and his favorite of them all of course. He was the one who fed him all the time and took that cat everywhere when he went out. One night the narrator returned home, “ much intoxicated from one of my haunts about town ” , he assumed that the cat was avoiding him. But being drunk made him think differently when he says, “ I knew my self no longer.” Not even being able to control himself “ My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.” Cutting one of the cat’s eyes with a pen-knife he had taken form his waist coat pocket. The next morning he didn’t know why he had acted like that and regretting what he had done by saying, “I experienced a sentiment half horror, half remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty.” He had a problem with alcohol because he again began to drink after the incident “I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.” Next one morning, he hung the cat to the limb of the tree while his tears dripping down his eyes. Weakness came into him, nothing could replace his

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