Are they all psychopathic? The narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ seems not to be – for he can recognise that his violent cruelty towards his cat is sadistic and vile, and even recoils in horror when his conscience is pricked and he realises that he is doing wrong. Heinlein, a later American author who made his name in the genre that Poe helped to create, science fiction, who remarked: ‘How we behave toward cats here below determines our place in heaven.’ What drives human beings to commit horrible deeds of pointless sadistic cruelty towards defenceless animals? Whenever we read upsetting stories in the newspapers about people who have committed violent acts upon pets for no discernible reason, we have probably wondered this. For one, both stories are narrated by murderers who conceal the dead body of their victim, only to have that body discovered at the end of the story. The ending of ‘The Black Cat’ suggests that a productive analysis between this story and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ might yield a fruitful discussion. The narrator piques our interest at the beginning of ‘The Black Cat’ by announcing that he dies tomorrow it becomes clear that he is to be executed (by hanging, aptly, given the fate of his first pet cat) for the murder of his wife. And with this revelation, the narrator’s story comes to an end. The narrator had walled up the animal when he had hidden his wife’s body. When the body is revealed, the black cat is there – and it was the cat that had made the noise that gave away the location of the corpse. He conceals the body, but when the police call round to look into his wife’s disappearance, a sound from the place where the narrator has concealed the body exposes the hidden corpse. His wife intervenes and stops him – but, in a fit of rage, he buries the axe in his wife’s head, killing her instantly. However, in time the narrator comes to loathe this cat, too, and once, when he nearly trips over the pet while walking downstairs into the cellar, he picks up an axe and aims a blow at the animal’s head. The cat takes a shine to the narrator, so he and his wife take it in as their pet. A short while after this, the narrator is befriended by a black cat he finds in a local tavern, a cat that has shown up seemingly out of nowhere, and resembles Pluto in every respect, except that this cat has some white among its black fur.
Setting foot in the ruins, the narrator finds the strange figure of a gigantic hanging cat on one of the walls, the dead cat having become embedded in the plaster (the narrator surmises that a member of the crowd had cut down the hanging cat and hurled it into the house to try to wake the narrator and his wife). All of the narrator’s wealth is lost in the flames.Ī crowd has gathered around the smouldering remains of the house. Later that night, the narrator wakes to find his house on fire, and he, his wife, and his servant, barely escape alive. Although the cat seems to recover from this, the narrator finds himself growing more irritated, until eventually he takes the poor cat out into the garden and hangs it from a tree. The animal bit him slightly on the hand, and the narrator – possessed by a sudden rage – took a pen-knife from his pocket and gouged out one of the cat’s eyes. One night, under the influence of alcohol, he sensed the black cat was avoiding him and so chased him and picked up the animal. But as the years wore on, the narrator became more irritable and prone to snap.
When he married, he and his wife acquired a number of pets, including a black cat, named Pluto. The narrator explains how from a young age he was noted for his tenderness and humanity, as well as his fondness for animals. First, a brief summary of the plot of ‘The Black Cat’.