SUMMARY OF THE BLACK CAT BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

The narrator states that we probably will not believe the story that he is going to tell us. He is about to die the next day. He was a pet lover when he was kid and had a lot of pets. He married at the young age. His wife was a pet lover too. They filled of their house with various kinds of pets, including a black cat named Pluto. Pluto was the one whom his wife and he like the most. The cat liked to follow him everywhere. When the narrator became addictive to alcohol, he was suffering from bouts of very bad temper and lost his patience with the animals, including Pluto, and his wife. He hit them when he was drunk.

 One night, he was drunk and returned home. He imagined that Pluto was avoiding him and it made him angry. As a result, he attacked the cat and gouged out one of his eyes with a quill pen. The next morning, the narrator regretted his action that he did on the day before. Pluto’s eye healed, but he avoided the narrator. In the spirit of perverseness, he hung the cat from a tree with a string.

That night, the narrator’s house was on fire. His wife and the narrator escaped and saw all their possessions burnt. The next day, he went back to the house and saw that all the walls have caved in except for one, the part of wall above the head of the bed which surrounded by crowed of people. Going closer, he realized that there was a shape in relief of Pluto within the wall. To reduce his remorse, he looked for a replacement animal.

One day, the narrator found a cat that looks similar to Pluto. This cat looked exactly the same as Pluto, apart from the white patch on its breast. He brought it home and became his wife’s favorite soon. After a moment, he started to dislike the cat. He hated the fact that this cat had one eye too, like Pluto’s. Moreover, the white color on this cat’s breast started to fade, which made him remembering Pluto. He really wanted to kill the cat.

One day the narrator and his wife visited their old house. The new cat followed them. Unintentionally, the cat made the narrator was about to fall. He was really mad. He saw an axe and swung it to the cat, but his wife stopped his arm. It just made him angrier. So, he swung the axe on his wife head and killed her. He hid his wife’s corpse in the wall of the wine cellar. At night, he had a nice sleep since he did not see the cat anywhere after hiding his wife’s body.

Few days later, some policemen arrived. The narrator met them calmly. He led the policemen looking around the house. Success fooling the policemen, he tapped his cane against the wall where he hid the wife’s body. Suddenly, he fainted as soon as he heard a crying which then turned into a horrible and scary moan coming from the wall. The wall broke down into half. The police uncovered his wife’s body inside the wall and found the cat sat at the top of the corpse. It discovered later that when he hid his wife’s corpse, he also hid the cat by coincident. The cat scratched the wall so that the narrator’s cruel action could be discovered.