The Black Cat: Best short story ever
written?
By Roger Weber
Edgar Allan Poe is well known for creating mysterious settings in his stories and poems,
such as in "The Raven." In his short story, "The Black Cat," he creates many different moods
through setting, but in this particular story, he never creates an air of mystery. Not as obviously
as in some of his other stories, setting greatly affects the plot and helps emphasize the ugly
situation. In this brutal story, Poe gives the story a feeling through his use of night and morning,
inside and outside, and what is contained within the house. Poe uses night and morning as
contrasting feelings about murder, one being of danger and rage, and the other being of sadness
and calm. The house is portrayed as both a trap and a safety zone, while the outside is portrayed
as both revealing and clean. Within the house, there are many specific areas and items that
represent certain feelings and situations. The main character has a foible. He lets his anger take
over his mind, and as a result, he commits some awful, disgusting crimes, and finds that his
setting greatly affects him, until he is caught. Poe masterfully incorporates aspects of night and
morning, inside and outside, and places in the house to shape his story.
Night is generally associated with evil and secrecy, while morning is generally associated
with new life and beginning. In Poe's story, night is associated with evil and madness, but when
morning comes, there is no rebirth. There is a new sober feeling about what occurred overnight.
Night is when the badness happens. Night means madness, and danger. At the start of the story,
the main character, at night, kills his cat when "the fury of a demon" instantly possesses him. He
proceeds to rip out one of the cat's eyes. In this story, Poe uses morning to mean a revival of
one's senses. When morning arrives, the main character "experienced a sentiment half of horror,
half of remorse, for the crime" he committed. Later in the story, after the first cat is dead, the
narrator is "stupefied" one night, and thinks it to be a good idea to purchase another black cat,
which, predictably leads to his downfall. Morning, however, represents sadness and sobriety.
This is once again shown when he hangs his cat, during the morning, and even while he is
committing the awful crime, he is penitent for the action he is committing. He has "tears
streaming from my (his) eyes, and with the bitterest remorse" for his action. Night is used to
represent danger in this case, though. On the day the narrator hangs his cat, he is woken "by the
cry of fire." While he doesn't hang the cat during the night, the danger that results is during the
night. This is a strange situation in which the narrator feels remorse as he commits the action,
and encounters danger later. Poe shapes the events about the cat around the flow of a day,
typically with night representing danger and evil, and day representing thought and sadness.
Inside and outside are very symbolic in Poe's story. While home is normally considered a
good place, the narrator's life is not what he wants it to be, so his home, although a safe,
comfortable, concealing place, is also a trap and a reminder of his bad side. The narrator's first
cat seems to be a burden to him, so he kills it. His house burns down a short while later,
destroying his other trap. The dark secrets about the cat kept in the house are destroyed. "The
walls, with one exception, had fallen in." Later in the story, the narrator kills his wife, leaving a
bloody deed behind him. Within the house, he is safe, but he realizes that he "could not remove it
from the house, either by day or by night," because outside is the world where revelations are
made, where there is cleanliness, and where any dirty deed is out of place. The outside is treated
as clean. He hangs his first cat in the garden, outside, in the place of revelations. It seems fine,
until it is revealed back to him, "upon the white surface" of a wall. The outside, if not
immediately, eventually exposes itself as an unsafe place of revelations. The inside, however, is
where the real secrecy is. The narrator is secure "in the inscrutability of my (his) place of
concealment" when the police come to search. The inside is a place for crime, but also a place
where that crime can remain hidden, as long as the criminal doesn't mind the guilt.
The house is where most of the events take place. Certain settings in the house represent
different feelings and descriptions. Poe identifies the whole house as a unit, but as the story
progresses, and the narrator becomes more entwined and disturbed with his life, the house is
separated into different parts. One of the most important parts of the house in this story is the
walls. They represent death, and secrecy. Poe is more descriptive of the murders because of how
he describes them in relation to the walls of the house. Both the narrator's murders are hidden
within walls. The cat is decimated and crushed into the "freshly-spread plaster." With his wife's
body, he decides to "wall it up in the cellar." While walls are concealing, they can be brought
down rather easily by fire. This happens to the narrator, and the crime can is revealed, as the
narrator sees in the wall "a gigantic cat." Similarly, curtains can be concealing, but they can be
destroyed easily. The bed of the narrator is surrounded by curtains for privacy, but one night, he
finds that they "were in flames." Death can be covered up, but there is always a way to be
caught. The most bestial murder, though, takes place in the cellar, which lies below the ground,
down some stairs. The stairs seem to act as a stairway to hell. The narrator views the cat "nearly
throwing me (him) headlong" as a disaster, but with his dissent, he encounters a greater disaster
– the murder of his female counterpart. Murder damns someone to hell. In the cellar, the narrator
commits a murder and gets caught, and he finally meets his punishment. What seems to be a
normal house is actually a house of horrors, and differing symbols.
Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Black Cat" is a story of a horrifying situation that is only
accentuated through the use of setting, through time of day, general place, and specific place.
Time of day is often used in stories, and in this one, Poe uses night to signify secrecy and danger,
and day to signify sobriety and sadness. He uses the place in terms of indoors and outdoors to
separate a dirty, hidden world from a clean, revealing world. Within that dirty world of the
narrator's house are walls, curtains, and stairs, each with significance. The settings in this story
do not immediately strike the reader, but it is clear that they influence the story, and the effect it
has on the reader. A story such as this would not be nearly as effective or descriptive without
such differences in setting. It is up to debate which settings are good, and which are bad,
especially since this story is told from the point of view of traditional evil. What seems deathly to
him, such as the outdoors, may seem like the best place to sane, law abiding humans. It is only
fitting that such a disturbing tale would be told by the criminal.