The Black Cat, By Edgar Allan Poe

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The cat, the most common species of the feline family, except the black variant, which is the universal symbol that you have been blessed by the gods of misfortune.. The unfortunate label is reinforced by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat”, the piece chronicles a struggling writer, Edgar, as he slowly descends into insanity.The story was further reinvented into a visual production for an episode of the television show “Masters of Horror”. The visual effects gives a more powerful representation to the events that transpired. The two versions of the chilling and horror tale brought elements to the table that the other seemed to lack. The film and story differed in plot and character development. The plot elements depicted in the …show more content…

The episode portrayed the various challenges that plagued Edgar as he progressed through the story, these include his alcoholism, his failing career as a poet,his crippling debts. the pressure to return to story-writing, his wife’s intense struggle with her ailment and his domestic torment by a cat that despises him. His failing career as a poet was the driving force behind his other struggles. Due to his low, almost non-existent, income, he suffered from debilitating debt: the bartender refused to serve him owing to the fact that Edgar retains his bad credit score and the physician refused to treat him or his wife again for the same. His debt commands him to drink. His alcoholism gave rise to the unpleasurable side of him. This,not only brought his wife great distress, but also worsened her condition. It started when, Virginia wanted to sell her piano to procure rent money. Edgar, in one of his drunken fits, became as stubborn as a bull to the idea. Even after she coaxed him into the idea, he generated stress for Virginia as he asked her to play one last time. This led her to go into a bout with her tuberculosis and almost die. Luckily, the doctor treated her revealing that she had a hemorrhage, indicating that Edgar’s alcoholism made him oblivious to his wife’s worsening condition. In the case of the book, which did not designate the protagonist with a name, served to shorten the main character’s struggle, portraying him as a man with no motives behind his alcoholism. In the start of the tale, when the narrator stated, “From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition” (Poe 3), this was the only attempt at portraying the narrator as an understandable character, who came from an innocent background and was corrupted along the

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