“The Black Cat” is an extension of “The Tell-Tale Heart”; therefore we can extrapolate knowledge from one work to the other to gain a fuller understanding of the conditions affecting these men.

The focus on the eye: “…a pale blue eye, with a film over it”[i] of the old man contrasted with the loss of the first cat’s eye in “The Black Cat”, followed by the missing eye of the second cat, symbolizes a threat to the horrors that lie within these men’s psyches.

Both men are overtaken by righteous rage, based on their own rambling reasoning, and they are relieved upon completion of the murders. Such is their confidence that they committed the perfect murders that one buries his victim under the planks and proceeds to sit over the spot while conversing with the officers, while the other buries his wife (and cat) within the cellar wall and even “rapped heavily with a cane”[ii] on the newly bricked wall to show off the sturdy construction.

These bold actions culminate when one hears, in his own head, the beating of the old man’s heart, like a watch muffled by cotton, continually getting louder until he must confess, while the other man hears “a cry, at first muffled and broken”[iii] until it becomes “… a wailing shriek,”[iv] audible to the astounded officers. Unlike “The Tell-Tale Heart”, it is not the man’s guilt in that brings about justice, but the feared cat which condemns him, bringing his fear to fruition.

 “The Tell-Tale Heart” begins with the narrator asserting that he is no madman and that the unspecified disease had sharpened his senses. “The Black Cat” refers repeatedly to the narrator’s alcoholism and increasingly altered and rather abruptly changed demeanor. The distinct behavioral changes, the heightened paranoia, and the calculated cover-ups suggest that these men suffer from an anti-inhibitory neurological condition unknown to 19th century science, which was then presumed to be madness.

 

 

[i] The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Random House, New York. 1975. p. 303

[ii] See above, p. 230

[iii] See above, p. 230

[iv] See above, p. 230