Black Cat Insanity

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s works, The Tell-Tale Heart and the Black Cat, he never fails to bring horrific images to his readers’ minds. In Poe’s works, the narrator, who also is the killer, tries to confuse the reader into believing he is not mad. He, the narrator, gives all these reasons why he is not insane but then proceeds to tell a story that ends up giving all the reasons why he is. Poe shows the reader the connections between each unreliable narrator and how they are incapable of recognizing reality by using various literary devices across the stories, including insanity, tricks of the mind, senses, and ego. Poe demonstrates the narrator’s unreliability and complete madness by employing elements of insanity, which the narrator vigorously rejects. …show more content…
Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.” He then says, “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes” (769). Eventually, the narrator begins to see the white spot on the new cat’s neck, as the rope hangs around Pluto’s neck. He also sees the cat’s missing eye, reminding him of when he took out Pluto’s eye; this proves that he now feels guilty for killing Pluto. The narrator begins to see everything on his new cat as he does to Pluto. In the analysis of the Black Cat by Norman Prinsky, he claims, “Though he claims to have been “half stupefied” when he first became aware of the second black cat, only a consuming if unacknowledged sense of guilt can explain his asserted failure to notice that it was one-eyed until after it was home, despite his prior continued petting of it in the tavern and detailed notice of its markings (“The Black Cat.” Masterplots II: Short Story
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