Edgar Allan Poe was a brilliant writer, who is famous to this day for his stories that contain unresolved issues that leave his reader to use their imagination. Poe was born in 1809 and invented the genre of horror and detective stories until his death in 1849. Throughout the ages, horror and mystery have always intrigued majority of both fiction and nonfiction readers. One of Poe’s known works called ‘The Black Cat’ is a prime example of a read that keeps you interested and captivated. In this short story, the author depicts a story within a story with radical dimensions. Through imagery, Poe was able to make a statement about race in the nineteenth century. I feel Poe portrayed his underlying feelings of racism through the narrator of the story by torturing the black cat, lynching this cat, and finding solace in a new cat, that isn’t entirely black.
Starting on page one of ‘The Black Cat’, Poe uses key words to illustrate that the narrator is fighting a battle within himself, “have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me” (Poe, pg.1). My theory is that Poe wrote the narrator to portray a man who is racist at the core, and knows it is wrong to be so. By the narrator cutting out the black cat’s eye, it adds the twisted, distressed feel to the novel. Somehow in a way, the cutting of the eye could be seen as a metaphor: “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity” (Poe, pg. 2) - the narrator was cutting out a piece of himself he despised-the racist portion.
Poe uses the black cat as a symbol of the American Slavery period and an oppressed race. He does so by treating the cat with disregard, hatred and torture. By cutting out the cat’s eye, the narrator also, in a symbolic way, is cutting out the part of society that is deemed different from the white-dominated society at the time. Another...