Those who have read any of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories know that most of them are full of suspense and mystery and that they efflict a feeling of horror and shock upon the reader.

Poe studies the mind, and is conscious of the abnormalities of his narrators and he does not condone the intellectual expedient through which they strive, only too earnestly, to justify themselves. He enters the field of the starkly, almost clinically realistic investigation of men who, although they may feel uneasy about their mental states when their tension lets up, are too far gone to understand their mania, let alone to control it (Gargano 171). His stories usually have a horrible murder theme in which there is a obsessive narrator and they follow the development of the theme step by step with a realism that, barring with genius, might case a

history from the twentieth-century psychiatry. This could not be presented more clearly than in "The Black Cat". Those who may deny realism to Poe cannot be very familiar with our daily newspapers, which periodically carry true stories of murders committed under just abnormal psychological pressures as those described in "The Black Cat" (Buranelli 76).

story in which we don't know whether what we are reading is fact of fiction (Prinsky 231). Poe's use of the first person point of view strengthens the intent of moral shock and horror writes

Gargano, James W. "The Question of Poe's Narrators." POE: A Collection of Critical Essays.

By telling the story from the first person point of view readers get the impression that they are only going to learn about what the narrator wants them to know and that they might not

mind" (5). This statement shows how from the first person point of view the reader is able to see deep inside the narrator's mind almost as if taking part in the action.

cat's eye symbolizes something else as May mentioned, "When we listen to the word 'eye', rather than look at it, we understand that when the narrator says he destroys the 'eye', he could mmean he destroyed the 'I', which would mean himself" (78). Another part in the story which can symbolize a lot of things is the fact that the cat is half blinded, this could exemplify that the narrator too is somehow half blinded maybe by drinking, or by guilt, or the unwillingness to see

Davidson, Edward H. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. 190.

Poe's use of point of view, symbolism, foreshadowing and theme all played an important role in this story giving reasons to why the narrator acted as he did. Although in the beginning of the story we understand that when the narrator writes "mad am I not" that he in actuality was in fact mad or insane. Even though the narrator states that what he did was caused all by the actions of the cat we find that in fact it was caused by him and his drinking. In this story the

with his wife in the cellar he is nearly tripped down the stairs by the cat, he then picks up an axe and tries to kill it but his swing is intercepted by his wife and he instead strikes her and kills her

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