black cat essays

black cat essays In His critical essay regarding The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, James W. Gargano makes the following points. The reader is enticed to believe the narrators idea that the events that occur within the story are inexplicable partly because of his repeated declaration that he cannot understand them himself. He puts forth the hypothesis that he is being driven by an impulse of the human heart to act irrationally, which leads to an explanation of the events being attributed to the souls desire to harm itself. Allowing the narrator this view of an uncontrollable desire is to agree with him in explaining away any set of morals man should live by as raw and unfounded and to do away with personal responsibility to live by a certain code of behaviour. The admission of the narrator that some intellect more calm, more logical and far less excitable that my own... will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects shows that his behaviour may be able to be simplified to ordinary psychological and moral laws. This is also sh own through his description of the fire, during which he implores the reader to search for moral and logical relations between the hanging of the cat and the fire by refusing, insincerely, to be able to establish a connection between the two. IN addition to his comments, the development of events in the story imply progress rather than random events and imply a degeneration of his mental state rather than unrelated events. Not simply a formal essay on perverseness, The Black Cat is a study of the narrators discovery of evil and his refusal to accept the moral implications of his immersion in this evil. Identification of these themes relies upon an ability to recognize the symbolic nature of this story since, if taken literally and not read with imagination, the details are so stupefying that the narrato...