Touchette 1

Bailey Touchette
Mr. Thompson
English 1301-31
November 27, 2016
The Effects of Guilt and Alcoholism in The Black Cat
Like many of his other short stories, The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
focuses on how guilt and alcoholism can affect a person physiologically over
time. On the eve of his execution for the killing of his wife, the narrator tells a
far-fetched and distorted tale about how the murder occurred. In it he denies
responsibility and pins the murder on an extraordinary sequence of events
beyond his control. His feelings of guilt are evident in the way he seeks selfjustification by twisting reality to conform to the self-image he wishes to
portray, his desire to abrogate responsibility for his actions, and his
overwhelming paranoia during the sequence of events. The effects of the
narrators guilt and alcoholism can be seen after her takes out his cats eye,
when he hangs the cat, and when the police come looking for his wife.
When the narrator begins his recollection of events leading up to his
wifes murder, He changes from a pleasant person to a wild one who drinks,
curses, and beats his wife and pets. (Hamid 3). His alcoholism brings a very
evil side of him to the surface. When he took out his cats eye for no
apparent reason after a drunken night out on the town, the next morning he

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is hit with the guilt of what he had done to a cat that he dearly loved. Instead
of him realizing that the alcohol is what made him hurt his cat, he begins
drinking even more to ease the pain of the guilt that he feels.
When the narrator hangs his cat in his basement, he watches it
struggle for breath and grow weaker and weaker. Before the cat is even
dead, he realizes that he wants his cat, but it is too late. He killed his cat
because it only reminded him of the terrible offense that he had committed.
The narrator goes on to say the he killed the cat because [he] knew that it
had loved [him], and because [he] felt it had given [him] no reason of
offence -- hung it because [he] knew that in so doing [he] was committing a
sin. (Poe 7). Immediately after the murdering of his cat, he again plunged
into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed. (Poe 7). His
consumption of alcohol only intensifies his guilt and increases the severity of
his actions. His consumption of so much alcohol distorts reality and he
becomes extremely paranoid. One might think that Poe is trying to portray to
readers the danger of alcohol when used as a crutch to suppress feelings of
guilt. The alcohol and guilt combined begin to drive the narrator mad. The
narrator sees another cat and convinces himself that it is the ghost of the cat
that he killed and finds the imprint of the gallows on his chest.
A few days later, the narrators drinking increases even more. He kills
his wife because he is afraid she will learn of his sins that he has committed.
He buries her behind a wall in the basement in an attempt to hide his crime
from himself. The narrator is constantly trying to rationalize his actions and is

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trying to suppress these soon to be overwhelming feelings of guilt by
attempting to rationalize his actions. In "THE BLACK CAT": PERVERSENESS
RECONSIDERED, Gargano states that his frenetic deeds and rationalizations
have all the appearance of a blind attempt to escape from ineluctable moral
consequences (Gargano 1). The police eventually arrive to search for his
missing wife, and the narrator follows them to the basement. Mockingly he
hits the wall that he buried his wife behind and says how strong the walls
are, when a screech to come from behind the wall. The police begin pulling
the bricks away and find his wifes rotting corpse and the black cat.
It is unclear how accurate the narrators story is, due to his alcoholism,
paranoia, and far-fetched story telling but it is clear that his alcoholism has
caused a domino effect. The alcoholism led him to hurt his cat and wife, his
guilt led to more drinking, which ultimately led to the murder of his cat and
wife. The alcoholism and guilt him has left him physiologically unstable and
awaiting his punishment for murder.

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Works Cited

Gargano, James W. THE BLACK CAT: PERVERSENESS

RECONSIDERED. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 2, no. 2, 1960, pp.
172178. www.jstor.org/stable/40753670.
Amper, Susan. "Untold Story: The Lying Narrator In "The Black Cat""
Proquest.com. Proquest LLC, 2004. Web. 3 Dec. 2016. This articles speaks
about the narrators physiological state and how he creates a false story in
order to divert attention from his crime.

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