declaring his crime to the police, because he could no longer take the thunderous beating heart.The “Black Cat” begins with the narrator describing himself as a good-natured man, and his deep love for animals. He was fond of one in particular, a large, black cat named Pluto. As the story moves on, the man becomes an alcoholic with a bad temperament and violent tendencies. He begins mistreating his wife and all the animals except for Pluto. Eventually his abusiveness turns to the cat, and he ends up cutting one of the cat’s eyes out and later, hanging it. That night, the man’s house catches on fire, and is forced to find another home. The man returns to the ruins of his former house and finds that one wall is left standing with an identical portrait of Pluto on the wall. The man is then haunted by what he had done to the poor feline. To make good with the evil he had done, the man searches for a cat as similar as possible to Pluto. He finds one alike the former, except for a white patch on the cat. Over time the man eventually hates this cat too, and tries to resist urges to kill the cat. Also, the white patch on the cat’s chest began to take shape into something that frightened the man very much.“It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name-and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared –it was now, I say, the image of a hideous-of a ghastly thing-of the GALLOWS!…” (Poe 109)The man was sure this new cat existed only to seek out revenge for his fellow feline’s murder. His anger grew towards a killing rage one day, and lifts an ax in the cellar to kill the cat. The wife, however, tries to stop the man, and in return he kills her. Promptly after killing his wife he begins to hide her remains in the cellar wall. After he finishes cleaning up the area, he begins to search for the cat with no...
