Poe's "The Black Cat" as psychobiography: some reflections on the narratological dynamics - Edgar Allan Poe - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Ed Piacentino

   For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I
   neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a
   case where my senses reject their own evidence. Yet mad am I notaeand very
   surely do I not dream.... My immediate purpose is to place before the
   world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household
   events. In their consequences, these events have terrifiedaehave
   torturedaehave destroyed me. Yet I will attempt not to expound them. To me,
   they have presented little but Horroraeto many they will seem less terrible
   than barroques. (849-50)

Other rationalizations follow, including those justifying the narrator's attachment to and affection for animals; explaining his change in mood and his consequent cruelty toward his animals, especially his black cat; his attributing his killing of his cat Pluto to the spirit of perverseness; his speculating how the hanged cat got into the burning house; his explaining his hatred of the second cat (if such a cat exists); his dread of this second cat as his rationale for not destroying it; his blaming at the story's close the second cat for "seduc[ing him] into murder and consign[ing him] to the hangman" (859).

Yet the most important of the narrator's observations--curiously something taking place in story time rather than in narrative time and serving the extranarrative purpose that quite possibly he did not intend, of subtly unfolding his troubled psyche and the real motive for the murder of his wife--is contained a small biographical event that he chooses to mention in the first part of "The Black Cat." In this description, which may seem incidental and irrelevant to the central narrative, the narrator states: "From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions" (850). While the narrator's comment about his distant past may at first seem strange, semi-digressive and peripheral, perhaps even inconsequential within the context of the main narrative, it does nevertheless suggest that what the narrator is communicating here represents what Genette, as previously noted, has designated as the "ideological function" of narration. The narrator's reference to his "docility and humanity" and "tenderness of heart" becomes both an "advance notice" as well as a "memory-elicited attestation" (these are Genette's designations), which, as will see, offer a possible rationale for his wife's murder. After all, given that the narrator is a felon awaiting execution for murder, this revelation about his former good nature and sensitivity functions as a counterpoint to the image of the hideous person that he has subsequently become. On another level, although this past incident is in story time, it also functions as a remembrance that bears a significant connection to the murder of his wife. Furthermore, in the narrative break that follows, he continues in the rationalization mode by emphatically stating his preferred love for animals over people: "There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man" (850).