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So what the reader now is seeing and feeling is well, you wild crazy person, you are being paid back for your sins; your karma has come back to haunt you, insane soul that you are. And then, of course, more police arrived and they tore the bricks away and now Poe enjoys sharing with the reader the gory details of the rotting body. "The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators." On the head of his wife's body was the cat, which had a "red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire." Worse yet, Poe says the cat had "seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman." The cat got caught up in the wall, along with his dead wife.
George Colton,...
[that there is in humans] an impulse to perform actions simply for the reason that they ought not to be performed." That sounds a lot like the critic quoted earlier, William Henry Smith. Maybe, even though they wrote their critiques many years ago, they just might be right.
Works Cited
Colton, George. "Poe's Tales." The American Review, 2.3 (1845): 306-09. (Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism Vol. 16).
Smith, William Henry. "Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe." Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 52.385
1847): 582-87. (Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 1).
Works Cited
Colton, George. "Poe's Tales." The American Review, 2.3 (1845): 306-09. (Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism Vol. 16).
Smith, William Henry. "Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe." Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 52.385
1847): 582-87. (Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 1).
.." (Poe, E.A.) This perversity in human nature causes the narrator to hang the cat - an act of unbridled cruelty and brutality which has no rational explanation except that the potential for such action lies hidden within human nature. The rest of the story follows the pattern of retribution for the sins of the man. After the killing of Pluto the house burns down, leaving only one wall in which the
Discussion Poe constructed the story in a way that the narrator seems to be already in his sane mind while telling his experiences of domestic violence. Sane but not very sane still; this is how a reader may think once he re-reads the first paragraph on how he describes his experiences. In their consequences, these events have terrified --have tortured --have destroyed me...To me, they have presented little but Horror --to many
He also tries to cover up his crime when questioned by the police, but his shame and guilt over killing his wife gets the best of him, thus leading to his confession of murder. Poe's use of grotesque images and very descriptive narration is best exemplified in "The Masque of the Red Death," published in 1842 which concerns Prince Prospero and his court in an unidentified location somewhere in Central Europe or perhaps Italy. Many
It is also a description of the symptoms a man that has fallen under the abuse of alcohol is showing, symptoms that often go to the schizophrenia and may cause him act against everything that we Humans call humanly and are confident that makes the difference. There are a few lights cast on traits and acts that make us not equal or worse than animals, they just reduce us
Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld, and Poe is foreshadowing a hellish and horrific experience for the narrator. He also sets up an expectation in the reader and truly tests the thin but palpable sympathetic emotional response that is built in the opening lines of the story. He foreshadows the narrator's actions by stating subtly that the narrator has begun to feel strangely as the story unfolds.
The narrator may have actually wanted to be able to express his caring side more openly but was not allowed to do so by the society. He had to suppress his love for human beings and in doing so, he transferred the same feelings to animals. Robert B. Ewen calls it ego defense mechanism, "whereby feelings or behaviors are transferred, usually unconsciously, from one object to another that is