the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all.]--"I may say an excellently constructed house. The walls--are you going, gentlemen?--these walls are solidly put together;" and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom. No sooner had the reverberations of the striking of the cane died away, than there issued forth the howl, "a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph..., such as might have arisen...from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation." The cat had completed its conquest, revealing the location of the corpse and consigning the wretch to the gallows. The final horror of the narrator, his crowning act of perversity, is reminiscent of the crazed killer of the old man in "The Tell-Tale Heart," who had succeeded in hiding his atrocity, only to betray himself in direst effect, again to the police. Later, we shall see a similar psychological imolation performed by the narrator on himself in "The Imp of the Perverse." "The Black Cat" illustrates many manifestations and vehicles which the perverse can assume. First the narrator succumbs to alcohol; then the narrators spirit of perversity, given a foothold in his psyche, causes the eventual decline in his temperament. As the story progresses, the narrator reaches the point which Poe describes: "With certain minds, under certain conditions, it [perversity] becomes absolutely irresistible...radical...primitive...." Alas, the hapless narrator cannot help himself. As mentioned previously, a traditional moralist will always be tempted to overlay his own principles on Poe's tales, in this story, expostulating the evils of drink, perhaps. And understandably, when such tenets reside at the core of one's belief structure, the temptation to perform moral jud...
