Page 5 - Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat (1843)– Plot
The story is told by a third person narrator who is in jail, sentenced to death by
hanging. He tells how alcohol has driven him insane and led him to kill his pets and murder his wife.
Once he was a kind and respecable man who loved animals but since he took to drinking his personality has changed for the worse and he has started abusing his wife and his pets, except for his belove black cat, Pluto. One night, the narrator is so drunk that cuts out Pluto’s eye and eventually hangs him in the garden. Feeling guilty aCer the murder, the narrator adopts another stray cat that looks like the cat he murdered except for a white gallows mark on its chest —but he cannot escape his guilt or violent tendencies.
Eventually, the narrator is driven so mad that he tries to kill the cat with an axe. His wife tries to stop him, and is killed. The narrator decides to hideher body in the house, behind the wall of the cellar. The narrator looks for the cat, but it is missing. For three nights, he sleeps peacefully. Then, on the fourth day, the police come to his house to invesIgate his wife's disappearance. During their invesIgaIon, the narrator hits the wall he has rebuilt to hide his wife's corpse. He doesn’t know the cat is shut behind the wall. The noise makes the cat howl, alerIng the police. They pull down the wall and find the dead body with the cat on top of its head.
LeR.
From The Black cat, by Audrey Beardsley, 1894.
Top. Henry Clarke’s illustraIon to the Black Cat,1919.