The Black Cat Themes

Edgar Allan Poe's horror classic "The Black Cat" offers a sinister portrait of the home. Things seem alright in the beginning. A young couple, animal lovers both, get married and fill their home wi...

In "The Black Cat" the unnamed narrator offers us a parade of violent acts. Eye gouging, hanging, axing – these are the gruesome highlights. Until the end of the story, when somebody is kille...

In some stories (think stories by Ernest Hemingway) drinking has both positive and negative effects on the drinkers. Not so in "The Black Cat." The unnamed narrator of this grim tale claims he bega...

"The Black Cat," a claustrophobic tale of marital life gone wrong, offers a distinct movement from freedom to confinement. We meet the narrator already in his prison cell, writing, to free himself...

Since the unnamed narrator of "The Black Cat" is writing from his prison cell, we can be sure that justice and judgment are on his mind. In the 1830s, when Poe was writing, the wheels of legal just...

Disturbing physical and psychological transformations – often for the worst – are characteristic of most horror and Gothic tales. In "The Black Cat" some form of transformation occurs i...