an american lit essay

8/10/2019 An American Lit Essay

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William Antonetti

ENGL 431

10/17/14

Midterm Paper

Poe creates an interesting narrator by making the audience inclined to believe

them, but at the same time leaving an aura of doubt surrounding them .At some level

the audience must believe the narrator as we are privy to their darkest deeds and

thoughts.He makes his audience suspicious to further allow the readers imagination to

wander into darkness and ponder whether or not Poe has revealed the full depravity of

his narrator.Poe recognizes that by making his narrator unreliable he make his stories

as dark as his readers imaginations are capable of. Poe knows his readers when

pushed in the direction of imagining horror can far more effectively worry themselves

than he can.He relies on the innate blackness and perverseness of the human mind to

strengthen his prose.

In Black CatPoe introduces us to an unreliable narrator.His mental state is

constantly being made an issue by our narrators own admission.His speaker opens

stating that he neither expect[s] nor solicit[s] belief (Black Cat) The narrator creates

incredulousness surrounding himself by stating that the following events are

unbelievable.He further admits my very senses reject their own evidence (Black Cat)

to lead the audience to further doubt what he is to tell us, but at the same time he has

been very upfront about potential madness and admits that his story is unbelievable.


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The audience sees this as honesty leading them to teeter between their trust of the

narrator and their apprehension about his reliability.He admits his panicked and

frightened state of mind may prevent him from seeing the situation clearly.The

audience is again torn, the narrator is being perfectly honest with them, but he is

admitting his own potential unreliability.

Poe flips his audience back and forth as they receive news of things that could

make our narrator unreliable, but at the same time builds his credibility.He is guilty of

intemperance, but he admits his flaws and admits them as such.Truly he would benefit

from lying about his actions, but he admits his wrong doing as he kills his cat Pluto .He

makes no effort to conceal his wrong doing which leads the audience to once again be

prone to believing his tale to be an honest one.Surely if he were a liar, he would make

some attempt to cover up the horrendous deeds he committed.Our narrator could very

well be honest, but Poe continues to draw attention to the narrators potential

unreliability while still giving them a reason to believe him.

Poe further leaves his readers puzzling, as he draws the narrators sanity into

question.We might suspect it as it is more likely than the supernatural events our

narrator claims led up to the murder of his wife .We in our suspicion are led to believe

more and more that despite his protestations that mad am I not -- and very surely do I

not dream (Black Cat), that our narrator is mentally unsound.In fact his protestations

lead the reader to further believe he is insane.The reader is forced to question whether

our narrators version of events did in fact occur.Was his housefire an accident? Did


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the cat have a gallows shaped mark? The events are called into question forcing the

reader to choose between the vaguely supernatural and the narrator being simply a

mad man. Because of the suspicion the reader must choose how to comfort

themselves.Do they take solace in the fact that these horrible deeds were carried out

by the hand of a crazed lunatic, or do they give into the fear that the supernatural exists

and enjoys tormenting our very existence? The uncertainty allows the reader to

entertain that, the narrator being unreliable allows the reader to wonder if the cat itself is

an unnatural being.The reader gains the enjoyment of the mystery and the unknown

while Poe forces the reader to think more and more upon his text .

The true unreliability of the narrator is one of the great mysteries of Black Cathe

claims to not be mad, and with some suspension of disbelief the story can be read very

rationally and free of insanity or the supernatural.The narrator even offers explanations

for many of the events that transpire, such as the impression of Pluto left upon his wall

following his home burning down.The narrator offers the theory that one of the

onlookers threw the corpse of his hung cat through the window to wake him from his

slumber and warn him of the burning home in which he resides .The presentation of the

possibility of madness or the supernatural spurs the reader to entertain notions they

would otherwise discard.

Were there no mystery surrounding the character and it was told in the manner of

a police report the reader cannot fill the depths of the narrators madness nor worry

about an abyssal nature surrounding the second cat.The unreliable narrator makes the

story something more than the grisly details of a murder and the capture of its


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perpetrator.The vagueness calls upon the perverseness innate to the human mind and

the darkness hidden within it.

Without the uncertainty in his narrator Poes prose would not be able to play

upon his readers imaginations.The narrators sanity and honesty play against one

another leaving the reader unsure of the truth of the tale.They are forced to determine

on their own what they believe to be the actual cause for the narrators decision to try

and murder his second cat and then murder his wife.The reader must carefully fill in

their own passages and is left to enjoy the unclear line between truth, madness, and

magic.

an american lit essay

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