The Black Cat

Before we get right to the nitty gritty of the nuttiness, a brief pause. Please join me in appreciating this adorable little sweetheart.

What might the narrator be repressing?

Out of all of Poe's works I've read so far, The Black Cat has got to be my favorite. Dark, eerie and haunting, The Black Cat walks the thin line of a man's mind, teetering between humanity and detached sociopathy.  

We witness the narrator's slow descent into madness, see him imprisoning himself within the shackles of his own mind. As time progresses, he starts to get more violent, more detached, more illogical until he commits the worst crime of all; murder. The catalyst? His crippling alcoholism. 

Still, alcohol doesn't magically give rise to new emotions and behaviors. Rather it unlocks the cage of social constraint, the cage of moral inhibitions and often brings out the darker side of a human being. The narrator was no different. He transforms from a man who adored animals to one who abuses them. He goes so far as to hanging his best friend, his cat named Pluto, just because it ran from him.(with good reason too; after all he did gouge out the poor creature's eye.) The narrator shows signs of anti social behavior early on, seeing that all his friends are animals.

The narrator represses his inner violent and illogical behavior, for his whole life, until he develops an affinity for alcohol. He and well, we the readers, use this as a crutch to explain his sudden change in demeanor. The narrator feels guilt, he just doesn't quite care that he does. His first thought upon killing his wife is how he must dispose off the body. He sounds almost proud of what he's done, which leads to his eventual downfall. His next thought is getting rid of Pluto 2.0, whom he adopted out of guilt at a bar (but not without a healthy helping of fear). 

By the end of the story he's succumbed to his madness. Acting upon his Id, he knocks on the wall behind which he'd hidden his wife's corpse. That's not a logical thing to do. His impulsiveness and cockiness lead to him being arrested and probably placed on death row.

And yet he blames the cat.

The last line is particularly interesting and a potential double entendre.

"I had walled the monster up within the tomb!", Poe writes. Perhaps the narrator isn't referring to the obvious monster(the cat), but rather himself. He walled up his inner desires, his monsters, within the tomb of his mind.

But they burst out and ruined his life. His own mind became his worst enemy.