SUMMARY ABOUT CAT BLACK

By: Jhon Boude Saez

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," an unreliable

first-person narrator relates how alcohol and self-
deception led him to kill his pets and murder his
wife. In a drunken rage, the narrator hangs his
beloved black cat Pluto. Wracked with guilt, the
narrator adopts another black cat, but its markings
provide a constant reminder of Pluto and of his own
evil deeds.

Opening with both suspense and mystery in his

revelation that he wants to “unburden” his soul
because he will die the next day, the narrator gives
details of his early love for animals and marriage to
a woman of the same sentiments, who presents him
with many pets. Among these is his favorite, a black
cat, whose name, Pluto, foreshadows the narrator’s descent into the murky regions of
alcoholism, self-deception, and violence.

When he does later succumb to alcoholism, the narrator shortly thereafter begins
maltreating his wife and pets, which gives a double meaning to his term for drinking,
“Fiend Intemperance,” referring not only to alcohol abuse but also to intemperate
transgression of rational thought and behavior. Eventually the narrator maltreats “even
Pluto. One night, presumably out of frustration, he seizes the cat, which has been avoiding
him. When it bites him, the narrator says he became “possessed” by a “demon” and with his
pocket knife cut out one of the cat’s eyes.

His alcoholism continuing, the narrator one night at a disreputable tavern discovers another
black cat, which he befriends and adopts, as does his wife. For this double, however, the
narrator rapidly develops a loathing. First, it has only one eye, which reminds him of his
crimes against Pluto. Second, it is too friendly an ironic inversion of the common complaint
that cats are too aloof, as the narrator complained about Pluto. Third, it has a white patch on
its breast that to the guilty narrator’s imagination looks more and more like a gallows,
which points both backward to his hanging of Pluto and, unknown to him, forward to his
hanging for the murder of his wife.

In the end, the narrator murders his wife and, after being caught, is executed by hanging,
just as Pluto was.

VOCAB:
Plaster
Searched
Cellar
Well-built
Suddenly
Dried
Gallows
Clever