Themes in The Black Cat

Here the narrator falters in his reliability, another such instance in a pattern that develops over the course of the story. Readers can detect a subtle division between the narrator’s subjective reportage—“my heart beat calmly”—and his actions—“I walked the cellar from end to end.” The narrator, clearly frightened in the face of law enforcement, exhibits the compulsive, pacing movements of an anxious person. The story he tells, however, is that of an unmoved spectator. The narrator’s unreliability serves Poe’s larger thematic exploration of the often immense distances between interior conception and external reality.

This quotation is an allusion to the Bible. It is an interpolation of 1 Corinthians 15:58, which reads in its entirety, “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” Chapter 15 of First Corinthians describes the Last Judgment, when Christ is expected to return to earth and resurrect the dead, transforming them into “spiritual bodies.” Poe selected this biblical passage for its theme of resurrection, which figures prominently in “The Black Cat,” albeit in less numinous ways.

Poe uses the noun “project” in an unusually layered way in this passage. A “project” is an undertaking or endeavour, referring in this case to the narrator’s effort to hide his wife’s corpse. A “project” is also the mental anticipation of an undertaking, the scheme of it, and here readers see a litany of schemes stream through the narrator’s mind. Finally, and most archaically, a “project” is a mere idea or object of the imagination; Shakespeare often used the word in this sense. As revealed by the shades of possible meaning in “project,” the blurred line between thought and deed is thematically important to the story: the narrator is often unsure of what is real and what is merely imagined.

Throughout the story, the narrator stands at odds with his own impulses, emotions, and actions. The syntax Poe uses to describe the narrator’s feelings for the cat underscore their autonomy and independence from the narrator’s intentions. The narrator is not the subject of his feelings: I felt disgusted and annoyed. Rather the feelings have a life of their own: “these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into bitterness and hatred.” This conflict between the narrator and his instincts is perhaps the story’s primary theme, and Poe allows the conflict to play out at the level of syntax.

The final image—that of the dead wife and cat sealed behind the plaster wall and then broken free—serves as a metaphor for the entire story. Those brutal tendencies the narrator had sealed away in his psyche were impossible to keep concealed. Just as his violent urges could not be contained, the consequences of those urges burst into public view in the final scene.

Here Poe highlights the Christian belief in a hierarchy of beings: humans, created in God’s image, exist in a higher tier than animals. In this paragraph Poe seems to be suggesting that this hierarchy is false (because humans are animals), or that the narrator has descended into an animal state.

It is not clear whether the narrator’s rational explanation for the impression of the cat is meant to be taken seriously. To return to the theme of cause and effect, the narrator either correctly traces the causal chain or constructs an elaborate illusion.

The narrator makes several references to his relationship with God throughout the story. His stance seems to be that his actions represent a deviation from God’s path. As he continues to sin, he struggles with the possibility of his own salvation, a problem he first poses in this passage.

Poe deepens the theme of dualism here, fleshing out the idea that the narrator’s wickedness is not an aberration but rather a manifestation of his core nature. One wonders whether this theme was of particular importance to Victorian-era writers, Poe and Stevenson included. By many historical accounts, the Victorian Age in England and the United States was defined by a culture of civility and repression.

This passage draws our attention to a theme of dualism. Within the narrator exist two competing paradigms. One part of the man—his soul, you might say—is good and loving. The other part is fiendish and uninhibited. This duality is as old as civilization itself: when humans are taught to control their primal urges, dark, “shadowed” (as Carl Jung would say) portions of the psyche develop. For the narrator here, alcohol serves as a key which frees his shadow self. This particular duality is most famously explored in Robert Louis Stevenson’s [Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.] (https://www.owleyes.org/text/dr-jekyll-mr-hyde)

Despite Poe’s insistence that his stories and poems do not contain morals and are designed solely to produce an effect, “The Black Cat” can be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of alcoholism. The narrator’s descent into alcoholism leads him to commit a series of increasingly wicked deeds. Though Poe’s goal may have been to chill the reader’s blood, one can hardly help but take away a message of temperance. Poe, as well as his brother, struggled with alcoholism; his own experiences may have informed “The Black Cat.”

Here we find the establishment of one of the story’s central themes. The narrator searches for some scrap of sense amidst a bewildering series of circumstances and events. The story implicitly asks us whether the world, or even our own actions, can be understood.