Te Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe?

Question

Q1. Throughout the story how do we see the narrator's personality change? (plz help me I dont get it?)

Q2. What may the black cat symbolise?

Answer 1

"The story has many themes, most of them relating to human psychology and several in the form of contraries: reason versus the irrational; human being versus animal; self-knowledge versus self-deception; sanity versus madness; love versus hate; good versus evil; the power of obsession and guilt; and the sources or motives of crime. As in many of his works, Poe is interested in the borderline between opposites and how it may be crossed.
Despite the narrator's explicit claim of sanity in the story's first paragraph, he immediately shows himself self-deceived by terming his story "a series of mere household events." Further, by the end of the first paragraph the narrator has circled to a contradictory position by expressing his hope for a calmer, more logical, and "less excitable" mind than his own to make sense of the narrative. A favorite adjective of his for pets, "sagacious", which he uses early in the story for both dogs and his cat Pluto, thus ironically indicates the wisdom he himself needs both to see life clearly and not to give in to the irrationality of drinking or violent behavior. What should distinguish man from beast -that is, the faculty of reason - the narrator too frequently abandons, a weakness expressed in the animal metaphor of his "rabid desire to say something easily" to the police searchers.

His early reference to admiring the "unselfish and self-sacrificing love" of animals reveals the narrator's blindness; ironically, his scornful words, "the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man", apply to himself. The narrator later reveals that his dipsomania is self-indulgent and self-loving, because he "grew ... regardless of the feelings of others" and dimly perceived that he had lost the "humanity of feeling" (compassion) that his wife retained.
Sheer emphasis or proportion in the story - the great number of words he spends on the cats contrasted with the brevity of his remarks about the maltreatment and murder of his wife - indicates the deficiency in both the narrator's insight and his feelings. He cannot see that guilt causes him to forestall mentioning his greatest misdeed until the story's end, while his feeling for his wife was too weak to prevent his murdering her. The narrator cannot see that his killing her is not a mere deflection from his murderous purpose, but its true aim, whose motives are laid down in the sixth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-second paragraphs of the story. Mutely representing goodness, she has been a constant irritant to him, one upon whom he can vent all of his pent-up feelings in one blow."

The cat, of course, symbolizes the deranged narrator's guilty conscience.

Answer 2

Summary:
The narrator of the story tells a tale of horror and murder from a prison cell. A lover of domestic animals, the narrator had had many differnt pets and had lived comfortably in a house with his pets and his wife. Soon, mostly because of the negative effects of alcohol, he began to despise the pets. Previously his favorite (because of its affection), a large black cat named Pluto eventually copied and seemed to mock the narrator so much that the narrator gouged out its eye and hung the cat. That night his house burned down and left a perfect bas relief of a cat with a noose around its neck in the one unburnt piece of plaster in the house. Soon the author wanted company of another cat and found one identical to Pluto, save for a large white patch of hair on its chest. The white patch eventually transformed from an nondescript patch to a gallows as the narrator again becomes increasingly loathful of the cat. One day the cat triped the narrator in the cellar, and the narrator brandishing an axe, swung it to kill the cat. His wife blocked the blow; and, in a rage, the narrator planted the axe in her skull. He walled up his wife in the cellar and, and without the disappeared cat to bother him, finally had a good night's sleep--even with the murder on his mind. Police came to investigate but they found nothing. They came back four days after the murder and the narrator took them to the exact place where he had killed his wife. While he is bragging to the police about the solidity of the walls in which his wife is entombed, a loud shriek alerts the police to something behind the wall. The narrator had walled up his cat along with his dead wife. "'The Black Cat' is a story of 'orthodox' witchcraft; the sudden appearance of the second cat from nowhere, the slow growth of the white marking, and the murder of the wife after the animal brushed against the protagonist on the stairs are touches of the supernatural" (Mabbot 848).


Importance of the work:
"The Black Cat" combines "several themes that fascinated Poe--reincarnation, perversity, and retribution" (Mabbot 847). It is partially related to "The Tell-tale Heart" because the narrator is so afflicted with perversity. Poe was able to create an entirely seperate person from himself for this story. "Poe's narrators possess a character and consciousness distinct from their creator--they speak their own thoughts and are the dupes of their own passions"( Hammond 27). Poe's favorite animal was the cat, and he had a black one named Catarina. Poe also had a drinking problem that caused him to rage. Although he is not the narrator, he feared for Maria and Virginia Clemm when alcohol caused him to become violent.

Allusion and Symbolism The narrator names the first black cat Pluto. In ancient Roman mythology, Pluto was the King of the Underworld, ruling over the abode of the dead. In Greek mythology, on which the Romans based their mythology, Pluto was called Hades. Pluto the cat, thus, seems to symbolize death to the narrator. That he gave the cat this name suggests that he thought it a sinister creature from the moment he first saw it.

Answer 3

Alright dude; the guy is an alcholic, that progressively get more cruel and violent. he's a scumbag to his wife, he kills her, things like that. He see this cat, kills it by throwing it out the window, but the cat keeps coming back. he eventually burns his house down, but the cat returns.

The cat could possibly symbolize his own self destructiveness. As the cat continues to return, the man get increasingly violent.