The Black Cat

1 -----Edgar Allan Poe

 Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat

Discussion

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 Literary style and themes: Gothic

• Questions of death
• physical signs;
• the effects of decomposition;
• concerns of premature burial;
• the reanimation of the dead;
• mourning

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“”
Poe suffered from the deleterious effects of alcohol
consumption throughout his life.
 
 • "The Black Cat" is first printed on August 19, 1843,
• The story is presented as a first-person narrative using
an unreliable narrator
•  it's a story about domestic violence and brutal murder
•  It's the death-row confession of nameless man who
destroys himself, his wife, and his pets.

The Black Cat

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 a r y
Summ

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#1
Mellow & Kind

Cut out one of the cat’s eye

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#2 House burns down

Looks just like Pluto

Hangs Pluto from a tree, killing him

7 France Telecom Group confidential
#3
When the cat follows the man and his wife
down to the cellar of the old house they have
to live in, he tries to kill it with an axe.

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“” His wife stops him and he kills her instead
walling up her body in the cellar  
#4 He hits
the wa
dead b ll behi
ody is n
hidden d which the
.

The voice of the cat responds, and the

“”
police tear down the wall and find the body,
with the black cat sitting on its head.

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 m / Narra
tor
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o / i s point
m b of vi
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Characters le

Scene Setting

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 Why The Man Went Out of Control ?

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 “The fantastic explores the indefinite boundary
between the real and the supernatural. The fantastic
is a literary category that contains elements of both
the rational and the irrational .”
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 Why The
TheMan Went
Spirit Out of Control ?
of Perverseness

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The spirit of PERVERSENESS”

what makes people do things

they know will be bad for
themselves and others

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 Who has not , a hundred times ， found himself
committing a vile or a silly 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 ？ This
spirit of perverseness ， I say ， came to my final
overthrow.

-------The Black Cat

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“” Why Do We Do Things

We Know Will Be Bad for Us ?

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 Insane

Taking normal human

behavior to extremes

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 What evil is ?
Where does it come from ?

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 Evil

• Local, small-time, even ordinary.

• Mass murderers, serial killers, the
totalitarian bureaucracy of Orwell's 1984,
the Nazis
• All humans have a shred of this kind of evil
inside them.
 

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