The Black Cat

Content Warning: This section references animal cruelty, alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness.

“The Black Cat” is a famous example of unreliable narration. By virtue of his very actions—abusing and murdering his pets and his wife—the narrator is untrustworthy. What’s more, he has an addiction to alcohol that may influence his temperament and perception of reality. In fact, the narrator himself admits that this is the case, but because he has a vested interest in downplaying his responsibility, it is hard to know whether to take this statement about The Consequences of Alcohol Addiction seriously; by “confessing” that his substance use drove him to suspicion, cruelty, and violence, the narrator may be seeking to mitigate his guilt in readers’ eyes. Even his most honest moments are therefore subject to doubt. To further complicate matters, there is evidence to suggest that the narrator lacks self-awareness—i.e., that he is not being fully honest with himself, or that he perhaps lacks the ability to see himself clearly. For example, his outburst about the indignity of a “brute beast” seeming to accuse him is starkly at odds with his professed love of animals and suggests that there are aspects of himself that he would rather not recognize.

Such cracks appear throughout the story in contradictions between statements, between actions, and between statements and actions. At the outset, the narrator claims that he is objectively recording facts without ascribing any particular meaning to his tale. Using understatement, he describes the occurrences as “a series of mere household events” (223). However, even granting that the story’s supernatural events took place, the narrator does not simply record them but rather frames them with references to superstitions, ghosts, demons, etc. This nudges readers to understand the story’s supernatural elements in a very specific way—not only as actual occurrences, but as occurrences that led to his moral downfall.

This sidestepping of responsibility is clearest in his depiction of the cats, which paints him as a victim of evil, possibly satanic, forces. When describing Pluto’s intelligence and the discussions about such with his wife, he acknowledges that she was a superstitious person who repeated the “ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise” (223). He claims to include this in the tale because he has just remembered it, but the association of Pluto with evil has the effect of rationalizing the narrator’s later disgust with the cat and violence toward it. The association becomes more emphatic with the second cat, whose howls the narrator describes as sounding like the “demons that exult in their damnation” (230). As these are the cries that lead the police to the wife’s body, a narrative emerges in which demonic forces first goad and torment the narrator—perhaps actually possessing him—and then betray him to his death.

Still taking the story’s supernatural elements at face value, an alternative explanation would be that the narrator falls into sin of his accord (if partly due to alcohol addiction and/or mental illness) and then faces divine retribution. The image that appears on the second cat’s chest is a gallows. In an era when capital punishment was widely accepted, this is a symbol not of the capricious torture one might expect from a demon, but rather of justice. Likewise, it is worth noting that the narrator attempts to explain away any non-scientific explanations for the appearance of the cat’s image on the burned wall. The convoluted rationalization does not even fully satisfy him, as he admits, “Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy” (226). The explanation does, however, allow him to sidestep the possibility that he is being confronted with evidence of his own guilt.

Of course, the narrator could also be misrepresenting events (intentionally or unintentionally). He first tells the reader that the second cat’s white splotch, though large, takes no particular form on the cat’s chest. Then, as his irritation with the cat’s affection grows, he describes it as a gallows. While it is possible that the patch of fur has metamorphosed, it is also possible that the narrator’s increasingly erratic emotions and dread of the cat are causing him to see patterns where there are none.

Despite (and through) the story’s many ambiguities, what emerges most clearly is the divided quality of the narrator’s mind and self. The extent to which he recognizes his own contradictions is debatable, but the contradictions themselves are not, which sheds light on his discussion of “the spirit of Perverseness” (225). The narrator asks, “Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” (225). This description of a rebellious spirit that seeks to inflict cruelty because it is cruel accords with the tale’s preoccupation with the notion of sin and punishment, as emblematized in humanity’s fall from grace in the book of Genesis. The idea is not merely that humans are predisposed to do wrong, but rather that humans do wrong in ways that they themselves cannot explain or justify; there is a side of human nature that is both dangerous and largely unknowable. This in turn suggests a symbolic explanation for many of the narrator’s actions. He is haunted by the repressed darkness within him, which increasingly emerges as he develops an alcohol addiction. To ease the strain, he rids himself of anything that calls to mind his better self—his cats and his wife—but this does not resolve the fundamental contradiction, which he is still grappling with as he writes.