My Short Essays

Madness and Murder

I would say the word mad comes from the old English word gemaedde, which literally means out of one's mind. Now, it is a word that has two meanings. It could mean angry or upset, but it could also mean insanity or mental illness. In the case of Poe's short story, both synonyms are used. The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" becomes mad enough to commit murder when anger issues, a mental disorder, and alcoholism combine to illustrate what can happen when psychopathy is left untreated.

To begin with, The narrator could not control his impulses or the evil thoughts that went through his mind, and things only got worse as he developed a disease of sorts. He says "But my disease grew upon me—for what disease is like Alcohol!"(Poe 1) The unnamed narrator in Poe's "The Black Cat" says he was a kind and gentle child, but the narrator is not a reliable source as the short story progresses, also as this short story is written as a confessionary letter the day before he goes to the hangman. The narrator says "From my infancy, I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition."(Poe 2) Furthermore, the mental health of the narrator has to be taken into account. Could he be stretching the truth to gain sympathy or pity from the reader? On the other hand, could the narrator want to relieve some of the guilt he feels about all the heinous things he has done? The second is less likely as he only feels a nearly intangible amount of guilt for a short period of time. It is presumed that the narrator is a man, but the short story never addresses the narrator with the pronouns he/him. Additionally, "The Black Cat" was written by Poe in August 1843. It is the 1840's and the narrator is married to a wife, so I will address the narrator as a man. Unfortunately for the wife, Pluto, and the other pets, the narrator is an angry and violent drunk. "He wakes up in the morning, sees what he did to his animals drunk the night before, and proceeds to drink to forget about what he did; unfortunately, this leads to more alcoholic fits of rage. He allows his drinking to get the best of him, which hurts others, every time." (Blom, E.Paul) He struggles with his addiction to alcohol; instead of going the easy way and calling it a friend or companion but going as far as to call it the fiend intemperance. Yet he knows what he does to those he loves while under the influence of alcohol but decides to ignore it.

On the other hand, the narrator's blind acts of rage could be attributed to his addiction to alcohol. He has many mental problems, and alcohol is only one of them. He developed a taste for violence from alcohol, as well as the confidence and guiltlessness it gave him. As he tries to prove his sanity to the readers in a letter, recounting terrible events of the past before his trip to the gallows, he says, "I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects."(Poe 3) The narrator believes he is sane, everything he did is justifiable. He is remorseless about his actions. As the cherry on top of his thought process, he wants to convince the readers to also believe what he did is ok - that they were completely normal things that happened, and for the readers to think he's not mentally ill. "Sentenced to die on the morrow, a nameless narrator laments that his readers will hold him insane, but he avows his sanity while, at the same time, admitting to the wild nature of the events he must put to pen." (Fitzpatrick, Sean) The narrator is an angry drunk but when he is sober, he still suffers from anger issues. He could be hungover because he gets drunk, then in the morning, he starts drinking to forget his acts of violence. He may drink often, however, he does not get so drunk that he blacks out every time. So the narrator has gotten used to being violent, and his aggression and irritability have become apparent. People don't lose all their memories when they are drunk. Pieces of their memory come back after some time has passed. The narrator knows that or has figured it out, after multiple drunken trips. [B]"but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched"(Poe 4). The narrator's lack of empathy further into Poe's short story "The Black Cat" makes him look deranged. The narrator goes from a man who loves his wife and pets to a man who hurts the people and animals he loves because he can not control his primal impulses. Add those dark thoughts, with alcohol controlling the narrator's mind and life, and you have an inhuman, abusive, drunken, animal-abusing monster who hurts those he loves. The anger that swells inside this narrator could be something easily hidden and hardly ever diagnosed by doctors, especially in the 1840s.