Kitty, Kitty

Edgar Allan Poe's the black cat is a beastly revenant, a demonic familiar belched up from the mouth of Hell to punish the Unnamed Narrator for his sins and indiscretions--most of which revolve around his increasing sadism toward that damned cat. or, it is simply an ordinary housecat, one that is abused and then mercilessly slain by the drunken narrator, who seems to be afflicted with Poe's "Imp of the Perverse" (i.e. the self-destructive force that leads men, like those who feel compelled to walk upon the edge of a vast, killing precipice, to flout their own destruction; or that of the ones they seemingly "love."

The narrator, a great humanitarian describing himself as a "lover of animals," is indulged by his parents by owning a veritable menagerie. something shifts inside of him, though; something wicked, something that is so attuned to the wavelength of destitution and personal destruction that he finds solace, increasingly, in a bottle. Why? He evinces a growing sadism toward his beloved wife, who tolerates him in the midst of their mutual despair.

The Black Cat represents the grim omen of death, perhaps; in his subconscious mind, she is a witch, a harbinger of ill-omen. Perhaps he can see her (we're assuming for the cat the gender of female) in his mind taunting, teasing; transforming from a sleek, black pussycat to a desirable woman. perhaps he no longer desires his wife? At any rate, coming home from his round at the local tavern, he nearly trips over that damned cat. And the rage, the sheer demonic sadism, wells up from within.

Using a knife, he cuts out the creature's eye. The Reader may be forgiven, at this point, for wondering what the reaction of the wife must have been.

But it is eyes that obsess Poe: the Old Man of the "Tell-Tale Heart" had a huge, wet, wandering, filmy orb we might well imagine seemed the unblinking eye of an ever-present, omnipotent, and angry GOD looking in at the young man, the insane young man, who kills the Old Man, and buries him beneath the floorboards (Poe burying his own fathers, both of whom rejected him as a child, and as a youth in his hour of need).

The guilt inside Poe is transferred to his Unnamed Narrator. You may rest assured that Mr. Poe is actually every single one of them. That Eye, that accursed Eye, here represented the ever-looking, all-seeing Eye of God, of Judgment or Fate, condemning Poe the wastrel, the failure, the lover of a child-bride that was, in point of fact, his own first cousin; letting her languish in poverty. Letting her die and fleetingly fly beyond his cold, bony grasp. What sort of a monster was he? What sort of a genius? What demon drove him? We shall never, truly, know.

(His LAST WORDS: "God have mercy on my poor soul.")

“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

He cuts out the cat's eye, as we stated. But this is not enough. One of his rages leads him to an act of kittycide so egregious as to bugger belief. he takes the poor besotted beast out and hangs it in a noose from a tree. Claiming to be weeping himself (vilely drunk one supposes), we fail to understand his psychology. Is he demonically obsessed? It is perverse, Will toward his own destruction that seems to drive him onward.

Alas, poor Pluto is now gone. Or is he?

The dissipated lifestyle of the Unnamed Narrator must certainly have left him and his wife in dire straits. if you drink every day, YOU DO NOT WORK. At least, not typically. One night, he sees, when ensconced in his favorite tavern, a black cat, sitting upon a hogshead of rum. Ah, here is Pluto come back to him! From beyond the grave, the cat has been reincarnated. And, lo! His eye is even missing! What's more, around his neck there appears to be the image "of a gallows" (since he was not hung on a gallows, but on the end of a noose, the Reader may find this somewhat perplexing).

The Narrator's house burns down, leaving only a fragment of scorched plaster in the bedroom. People gather around it, as the scorch represents a sort of miraculous prodigy--the image of a huge black cat. We may get a glimpse of the madness behind the tale, then, as we are left to wonder if this is the advent of "supernatural forces," or simply the mind creating order and meaning out of random patterns, like seeing castles in the clouds.

(It is, however, a presaging of the Narrator's inexorable doom. The Kitty is NOT in the cupboard, but in the very walls.)

it is not long before he picks up a hatchet to bury the new black cat. His dissipated ways have led him to a state of vile disintegration, orally and mentally. His wife, trying as she might to intervene in this act of utter barbaric cruelty, takes the killing stroke herself and succumbs instantly.

Now he is a murderer of a human being; not only that but the killer of his beloved wife. What to do?

Because of a recess in the brickwork of the basement wall, he decides to hide the body behind a new wall, one which, like Montressor in Poe's equally horrific "Cask of Amontillado," he builds slowly, brick by brick, but without the relish of accomplishment felt at the murder of Fortunato. Poe must have loved these walls, this form of concealment; sin and horror hidden from the All-Seeing Eye that haunted him, haunted his conscious and goaded his guilt. But, behind a wall, all is concealed, even the grisliest of all crimes.

A cry in the neighborhood has brought the police, but the Narrator asures them that nothing there is suspicious or out of sorts. Alas, it is the cry of the black cat, Pluto the Second, from behind the newly bricked-up wall, which alerts the officers that all is not well. Hastily, they tear up the brickwork, only to find the mutilated cadaver of the Narrator's wife behind the wall. And, sitting on top of her head, her furry little fangs dripping blood, is the Cat Itself, which he has inadvertently bricked up WITH her, and whose cries betrayed him, so that "Tomorrow I must die." But was it a case of supernatural vengeance?

Or, was it simply that of a mad mind associating the wrongs and abuses committed against an animal, a string of misfortunes, and his own slide into madness, that created the association between the presence of a "familiar" such as the seemingly deathless black cat, the harbinger of doom, and the man himself. The Reader is left to wonder.

"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe, Read by Christopher Lee