Pathetic fallacy: The Black Cat

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I need examples of pathetic fallacy in The Black Cat. Preferably with end notes.

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2001

Answers

Shouldn't have mentioned end notes. Most answerers are reluctant to be complete homework shills. The fallacy is in the mind of the murderer, his delusions so cannot be laid wholly at the feet of a superstition promoting writer. The cat becomes embodied with the murderer's guilt rage, memory, obsession and a circular revenge/justice where sideways logic, totally askew puts the cat ahead of his wife's abuse and murder. The murderer seems to know his evil when drunk, but blames and acts upon his vices through personalizing and scapegoating the cat.

The old Poe theme of the dead don't die and keep coming back, this time personified in an animal. Some humor in that Poe loved cats and had a couple of his own. Seemed to exhiibit some good awareness therefore of the peculiar characteristics of cats that lend themselves to the pathetic fallacy. But did the cat really feel and magically perform as the obsessed alcoholic narrator claimed? oddly enough few of Poe's bizarre tales included clearly supernatural events or characters, but these borderline perceptions or misperceptions which are our main experience of such things. Poe loved logical explanations to rule over these wild temptations, sometimes successfully.

YOu can go line by line and find the examples you need remembering it is the narrator plunging deeper into the fallacy through his own guilt and semi-insanity.

-- Anonymous, October 04, 2001


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