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Here is another classic Poe tale of dissolution and madness. It's very similar to The Tell-Tale Heart, yet different in interesting ways. For one thing, this tale is told from a distant, calm, and indeed sane perspective. Unlike The Tell-Tale Heart, which begins with the narrator breathlessly trying to convince the reader of his sanity, here the narrator calmly states that "I neither expect nor solicit belief" in his tale, but that because he is to die tomorrow (presumably to be executed), he wishes to "unburthen my soul" of the events that "have terrified--have tortured--have destroyed me."
We begin with a mundane account of the narrator's early years. He was known from a young age for loving pets. What a good guy! After his marriage, his wife gets him birds, fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat. And that's where things start to go wrong--with that cat--or rather with the narrator's perception of it. There's a hint that the narrator starts abusing alcohol, and then starts abusing the cat, and when the cat bites him a little, "a demon instantly possessed me" and he cuts out one of its eyes.
***spoilers to follow***
Quickly the descent into madness gathers force. He hangs the cat, not because it did him any wrong, but because of precisely the opposite: he "hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense;--hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin." It's the transgression itself that he can't resist. When he gets another cat, he can't help feeling the same way toward it, and the pressure builds inside him until he takes an axe to it, and when his wife stops him, he kills her with the axe, bricks up her corpse inside the wall, and when the police come and search his house, they don't find her until he can't help himself--he taps the wall until there's a wailing shriek from inside, and the police uncover the corpse and there is the cat too, "whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman."
There's an interesting and perhaps obvious use of symbolism throughout--the voice from the bricked-up tomb is like the repressed voices inside him that caused him to do these evil deeds, and the black cat is of course a famous symbol of superstition and bad luck. Nonetheless, this tale isn't too heavy-handed about any of this. It works on a purely narrative level in the same deliciously macabre way of Poe's best work, and provides another keen insight into irrationality and the demons lurking inside the human heart.
We begin with a mundane account of the narrator's early years. He was known from a young age for loving pets. What a good guy! After his marriage, his wife gets him birds, fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat. And that's where things start to go wrong--with that cat--or rather with the narrator's perception of it. There's a hint that the narrator starts abusing alcohol, and then starts abusing the cat, and when the cat bites him a little, "a demon instantly possessed me" and he cuts out one of its eyes.
***spoilers to follow***
Quickly the descent into madness gathers force. He hangs the cat, not because it did him any wrong, but because of precisely the opposite: he "hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense;--hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin." It's the transgression itself that he can't resist. When he gets another cat, he can't help feeling the same way toward it, and the pressure builds inside him until he takes an axe to it, and when his wife stops him, he kills her with the axe, bricks up her corpse inside the wall, and when the police come and search his house, they don't find her until he can't help himself--he taps the wall until there's a wailing shriek from inside, and the police uncover the corpse and there is the cat too, "whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman."
There's an interesting and perhaps obvious use of symbolism throughout--the voice from the bricked-up tomb is like the repressed voices inside him that caused him to do these evil deeds, and the black cat is of course a famous symbol of superstition and bad luck. Nonetheless, this tale isn't too heavy-handed about any of this. It works on a purely narrative level in the same deliciously macabre way of Poe's best work, and provides another keen insight into irrationality and the demons lurking inside the human heart.
