"The Black Cat" is a story about a male narrator, who is going to be executed in 24 hours as a punishment for the murder of his wife illustrates the events that lead him to his madness and death. When he was a child, he was constantly bullied at school because of his tenderness. After getting married for few peaceful years, the narrator's behavior became worse and worse because he started to be inflicted with alcohol. Whenever he was drinking too much, he would do something terrible, included carving out the eye of his first black pet cat with a penknife, hanging that cat by the neck on the limb of a tree, attempting to murder the second cat because of the white blemish on its breast reminded him his murder of his first cat, and murdering his wife with an axe and hiding her body behind a wall in the basement. Finally, his crime of murdering his was found out by the policeman due to the narrator's tapping on the wall which was contributed to it's falling down and the his wife's corpse's revealing (Badenhausen 487). At the age of 17, Poe left Richmond for studying in the University of Virginia. At that time, many wealthy young southern students had already learned to card games for money. Also, drinking strong liquor was also popular among the young students, and they often drank too much. Not surprisingly, Poe was influenced by what he saw around him. Whenever he saw his friends drinking, he couldn't help but drinking with them, and he also consider it as a manly thing (Porges 44). In 1835, Poe was working the Messenger, a newspaper company. During the time he worked in this company, Poe gradually found that the quarrels with Thomas White, the official of Messenger, made his situation there unpleasant; therefore, he drank much more than before (94). In "The Black Cat," Badenhausen indicates that " the narrator suppresses the symptoms of anxiety by self-medicating with alcohol instead of trying to discover the real source of his psychic stress"(492). In Poe's real life, he did have drinking problem. He especially drank much more than usual when he encountered some problems that he couldn't work out. At this point, Poe reflects himself in part of the narrator's character. Moreover, throughout this tale, the cat plays an important role as the symbol of anxiety, quilt of the narrator. "for he believed the cat or the monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The quilt of my dark deed disturbed me but littleKThe glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained (qtd. in Badenhausen 493). The narrator considers the second cat's disappearance as the release of the cruel deed to the first cat and the murder of his wife. That's also the reason why the narrator is so eager to kill that cat because he could only free himself from obsessing by the guilty of murder and the dread feeling of his problem life by killing the cat, the symbol of the fear of his own problem life.

" The Fall lf the House of Usher," one of the greatest short stories, is a tale about Roderick and his twin sister Madeline, the last of a very ancient family. They lived in a gloomy mansion that was surrounded by a strange, melancholy, desolat

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Approximate Word count = 2162
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)