In “The Black Cat”, by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator commits a brutal murder of his wife and also tortures and kills many of his own pets. This leads to the question, is he crazy? At first glance, his actions do seem to make him appear insane but there is evidence in his story that shows that he is not really crazy.
The narrator opens his story by telling the reader that he knows what he did was unbelievable and therefore crazy, “I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence” (Poe, 230). A truly insane man would not be able to recognize that what he has done is irrational.
The narrator offers a couple explanations for why he did what he did and one is alcohol. He says, “But my disease grew upon me—for what disease is like Alcohol!—and at length even Pluto—even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper” (Poe, 231). Alcohol does not justify the actions of the narrator, but it probably impaired his judgment. He may not have murdered his wife and pets if he had not been under the influence of alcohol, which is another piece of evidence that shows that he is not crazy but rather an alcoholic.
When the house catches fire and an impression of the black cat is left on a white surface, the narrator uses reason to explain what he was seeing. He says, “By some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster… had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it” (Poe, 233). The narrator tries to explain the impression of the cat, instead of thinking superstitiously and believing that it is haunting him. This shows that he is not crazy because he makes a clear argument as to how the impression could have gotten there.
I think that what the narrator did was crazy. It is crazy to kill your pets and murder your wife and stuff her in the wall of the basement, but there is a difference between being crazy and doing something crazy. Alcohol may have been what caused him to commit the murder. He also reasons and explains throughout his story like a man that knows what is sensible and what is not. Therefore I do not think that the narrator is crazy.
Brent you make a good argument that the narrator is not crazy but you have to take into account the point of view in which the story is being told. Since this is a first person narrative, we are seeing things through the eyes of the narrator himself. I believe that if you are a crazy person you would believe that you were a sane person. Therefore looking at this story the through narrator’s point of view and not somebody else can give the illusion that he is sane. If you look at the part of the story when there is a crowd around his burnt down house the narrator, hears words such as “strange” and “singular” and he believes that they are talking about the shadow of the cat being hung on the wall that he sees (Poe 233). When in fact we don’t know whether or not everyone is seeing this or just the narrator because of the point of view the story is told in. The crowd could have just thought that is was “strange” that there was a “singular” wall still standing after the whole house had gotten burned down. This shows that the point of view of the story was chosen to make the reader take a side on whether or not the narrator was sane or not.
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