"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe

This is a paper I wrote for Composition II. The assignment was a 3-page reaction to a peer-reviewed scholarly article on your research concentration (mine is Edgar Allan Poe). (Edit: I made a 96 on this paper.)

~Reaction to “Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe’s “The Black Cat”” by Joseph Stark~


“The Back Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is a typical Poe-tale of murder, mystery, and the melodramatic macabre. The nameless narrator recounts the story of gouging out the eye of and hanging his faithful black cat from a tree, and axing his congenial wife. Though taken to drinking, the narrator describes himself as “noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition” and a lover of animals (Poe 1). While Poe’s stories are always filled with suspense, the lack of resolution in “The Black Cat” is what makes it so memorable.
In the beginning, the narrator declares, “My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.” (Poe 1) Mere household events are a far wail from grotesquely murdering one’s wife by bursting her brains open with an axe. He continues, “-Some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.” (Poe 1) The narrator is hoping to rationalize the irrational and naturalize the unnatural. If an intellect explained these events as effects of very natural causes, surely this monster would have two heads, three or four mouths, and no brain at all. The ambiguity of the narrator leaves the reader with nothing but confusion and questions. In this paper we will analyze some possible answers to these lingering questions by looking at an article by Joseph Stark, but what we are going to find is that Poe was merely trying to show us the irony of life.
The article “Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe’s “The Black Cat”” by Joseph Stark tries to answer some of the questions by looking at some of the influences Poe might have had when writing. Stark looks at human depravity associated with Calvinism and animalistic identification that comes from evolution as some of the influences of Poe. Stark also explores psychological damages from the narrator’s childhood and his alcoholism. Or it could be pure insanity that led a gentle friend of animals to suddenly become an axe murderer.
The first area that Stark talks about is human depravity, which would explain why the narrator committed evil, despite the lack of motive. This comes from the first point of Calvinism, which is “total depravity.” Calvinism would have been a large influence on Poe due to its popularity at the time. This would create murder as an effect of a “very natural cause,” because the mind of man is completely and utterly depraved. As Poe writes, “I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart- one of the indivisible faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man” (Poe 2)
Another reason could be that the scientific realm (approximately 20 years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species is published) was flourishing with ideas of evolution and comparing “the Ourang-Outang’s similarities to humans with the nebular hypothesis led to the troubling conclusion that the universe (and hence, all humanity) may be motiveless, irrational, and physically determined.” (Stark 256) We have a limited knowledge of Poe’s religious and scientific interests, but it is blatant in his work Eureka: The Material and Spiritual Universe that Edgar Allan Poe had a strong interest in spiritual matters interacted with science. In another window of science, there is Psychology that could be used to explain this strange twist of events in “The Black Cat.” The narrator briefly mentions as a child that he was “a jest of [his] companions.” (Poe 1) This could have simmered and released itself through murder.
The fourth stab into darkness would be the narrator’s alcoholism. This is incoherent due to the narrator’s sobriety during both murders. Finally, maybe the nameless narrator is insane. What else could explain this softhearted man’s actions? Soft as an axe’s blade, that is. “Motive and Meaning” leaves us with “Every investigative attempt to get to the heart of the narrator’s crime operates solely within the realm of “plausibility” but cannot prove probable or conclusive.” (Stark 263)
The serenity that follows the answer to a suspenseful question was left out of “The Black Cat.” “Motive and Meaning” addressed this, but like Thomas Edison’s 1000 ways that didn’t work to create a light bulb, it left us with “answers” that don’t answer our questions, at least not in the way we desired it.
I give my own answer in the form of a single word: irony. The paradox of a docile axe murderer, a killer from where we least expect it, who commits a crime because he wants to commit a crime. An element of surprise that might be related to humour, except it’s not funny. It is evident that life has a sense of irony that holds it together like a theatrical “fishing wire” that cannot be seen holding an acrobat appearing to levitate. Poe knew this, because he understood the ironic side of human nature. We can see this with the modern example of Dennis Rader, who in many ways parallels the narrator in “The Black Cat.” Rader is considered one of the most morbid mass-killers of our time. He is known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) for the way he, as he deemed it, “put down” his victims. From an outside view, Dennis Rader was an unexpected suspect, because he was a faithful and active President of the Congregational Council at his Lutheran church, a veteran of the U.S. air force, a government employee, a conservative Republican, and a cub scout leader holding a bachelors degree in Administration of Justice. He too was a nameless narrator of his story, who wrote anonymous letters to the police, avoiding capture for his ten gruesome murders for over 25 years. His victims were random, and his motive nothing more than murdering for the sake of murdering. So it is in “The Black Cat.” “As Augustine stole the pears solely for the joy of sinning, the narrator likewise claims to have killed the cat simply “because [he] knew that in so doing [he] was committing a sin.”” (Stark 259) “The Black Cat” ultimately leaves us with many questions, which Stark tries to answer by looking at religion and science. However maybe the answer is simpler. Maybe, Poe is trying to merely show us the irony of human nature.
Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.”

Stark, Joseph. "Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe's "The Black Cat."." Mississippi Quarterly 57(2004): 255-264.