ing the warring principles of the poet’s divided nature...The action of the story is the dreaming soul’s gradual emancipation from earthly attachments...the duration of Poe’s typical story is the duration of a dream” (59).
The entire story takes on an illusory nature that is meant to create suspense and underscore the potential for impulsive, perverse behavior that lurks in all human souls. The narrator quite often cannot understand his emotions or feelings. He tells us time and again he does not understand why he did this or that, such as cutting out the eye of his beloved cat or growing to hate the replacement cat. We have often witnessed accounts of murders who confess that they are not sure why they murdered someone, they just did. Thus, despite the narrator confessing to committing his crimes in a state so drunk he blacks out and does not remember his deeds until the next day and despite his growing superstition that black cats are the messengers of evil and doom, it is still impulsive, perverse behavior that rules the narrator more than alcohol or superstition. The narrator at times appears to be a marionette whose impulses are on strings that another other than he controls. Broussard comments on this condition in Poe’s works that most often highlights the hapless fate of human beings who remain prey to the darker impulses of human nature: “Man’s fate is death, not life. Life is a jest, man’s hope is as illusory as the wind, his real nature surmounted with cap and bells, his role no more real than that of a jester in carnival time” (97-98).
In The Black Cat we cannot argue that alcohol and superstition do not play a role in driving the narrator to his acts. However, inherent in human nature before these external stimuli are encountered is the capacity for good and for evil. In the story we see a split personality within the narrator. The narrator cann
...