The Black Cat

“My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them.”

The narrator seeks to present his narration as an objective recording of facts but acknowledges that he is terrified by their occurrence. In suggesting that his tale is free from artifice or explanation, he understates the supernatural elements that will saturate the rest of the tale.

“There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”

Though later the narrator refers to the second cat as “a brute beast,” he here uses the same word to favorably compare animals’ unconditional love with humans’ changeable affections. He uses this comparison to explain his early affinity toward animals and to start sowing doubt about the goodness of humanity.

“In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point—and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.”

The narrator himself is making an allusion to the superstition about black cats, but by attributing it to his wife (rightly or wrongly), he distances himself from the assertion. He claims to have merely remembered it when in fact the inclusion seems an effort to explain his tale—something he previously said he would not do. This is an instance of his unreliable narration.

“Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character—through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.”

The narrator personifies “intemperance”—i.e., excessive consumption of alcohol—to explain his changing nature and cruelty. The word choice yokes The Consequences of Alcohol Addiction to The Sources of Sin, likening alcohol to a demon that drives him to do things he would not do of his own free will.

“But my disease grew upon me—for what disease is like Alcohol!—and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old and consequently somewhat peevish, even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.”

The narrator capitalizes “Alcohol” to emphasize how his disease has taken on a life or agency of its own. He uses his abuse of alcohol as a rationale for his increasingly cruel actions toward his wife and pets. However, even as he attributes his actions to alcohol addiction, his words suggest another explanation; the parenthetical remark that Pluto had grown “peevish” assigns blame to the cat, implying that its behavior provoked him.

“The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.”

The concept of the soul is invoked to show how the narrator’s betrayal of Pluto marked his descent into a malevolence from which he cannot return. He is losing self-knowledge and identifying with evil. What was once horrific is now thrilling.

“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

The narrator expounds on the “spirit of Perverseness” in a way reminiscent of Christian concepts of sin and evil. Humans are innately predisposed to do wrong for no reason beyond the fact that it is wrong.

“One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.”

Again invoking Christian conceptions of sin, the narrator discusses how he murdered Pluto despite the fact that doing so pained him. He violates what he knows to be good and compassionate to establish his freedom to act as he pleases. Having flouted the laws of decency and God, he reckons his soul to be entirely lost and unredeemable.

“I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts—and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect.”

The story implies a connection between the narrator’s murder of Pluto and the burning down of his house. However, the narrator insists that is not what he is doing and claims to be merely recording facts, as he initially said he would.

“When I first beheld this apparition—for I could scarcely regard it as less—my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid.”

The narrator describes a convoluted scientific mechanism by which the image of Pluto might have appeared on the one standing wall of the burned-down house. He calls the image an “apparition” but quickly downplays the word’s significance, offering a scientific explanation for what the reader likely assumes is a supernatural occurrence. The rationale he offers rings as hollow, and his need to find such a rationale speaks to his guilty conscience and fear of consequences.

“What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.”

The narrator draws a chain of association from Pluto to the second cat to his wife. Her continued “humanity of feeling” reminds the narrator of his own depraved impulses toward those that express love and affection for him. The missing eye suggests the vague supernatural possibility that Pluto is somehow still present in the tale and foreshadows the narrator’s attempt to take the second cat’s life.

“And now I was indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast—whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me—for me, a man fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable woe!”

The narrator alludes to the Genesis creation story by mentioning that he is created in the image of God. He expresses excess pride in this fact and resents that the second cat has presented him with the image of a gallows. In an act of hubris, he rebels against this divine foreshadowing of his punishment.

“Uplifting an axe, and forgetting in my wrath the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal, which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded by the interference into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the ax in her brain. She fell dead on the spot without a groan.”

The narrator compares his rage to something born of hell. He murders his wife for showing the same compassion toward animals that was once his defining characteristic. She sacrifices herself to save the cat, who calls justice down upon the narrator at the tale’s end.