Black Cat by Poe the Term Paper

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But whoops, from inside the wall that he had so carefully reconstructed to hide his evil deed, came a "cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman - a howl - a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell..."

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, a critic from 1845, writes this about "A Black Cat": "...A story, exceedingly well told, illustrative of a theory... [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,.....