The Raven And The Black Cat By Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe Essay As time goes on, each and every human gets closer and closer to dying. For some it will come sooner than others, but there is no way to escape. Unfortunately for Edgar Allan Poe, death surrounded him for all of his life. “The Raven” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe exemplify aspects of death from his personal life, although the stories’s use of animals as symbols and stimulating plots differ, proving that the past is not to be forgotten. To begin with, symbolism in both tales is used to represent death in Poe’s life. In “The Raven” Poe uses a raven to show the death in his family. A raven lands on a bust of Pallas and irritates the main character by not leaving. The protagonist then muttered, “‘Other friends …show more content…

He suggests that other “Hopes have flown before” showing he has lost significant others before. Prior to publishing “The Raven”, his mother, foster mother and childhood crush had already passed away. Poe may have lost faith in long term relationships, leading him to conclude that the raven would leave. Also, Poe chooses the Raven as the animal of the story due to the fact of its black color. Black is used to symbolize death and darkness, two subjects that are discussed in the poem. Additionally, the short story, “The Black Cat”, uses a black cat to symbolize Poe’s inauspicious family history. After the main character, and narrator adopts a second cat he determines that, “What added, no doubt, to the hatred of the beast was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its …show more content…

The main character of “The Raven” becomes irate seeing that the raven will not leave him alone. He exclaims, “‘Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!...Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door! / Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”. The storyteller can no longer stand the bird’s presence. When the tale reads, “Night’s Plutonian shore” Poe is referencing the gates to hell. Pluto’s shore is the beginning to an ocean of hell, which suggests that the bird is now some sort of demonic creature tasked to haunt the narrator. The narrator is in so much emotional pain he feels that the raven must “take thy beak from out my heart”. Likewise, the narrator of “The Black Cat” has similar feelings to his own animal. Following the adoption of a second cat, the narrator remarks, “For my own part, I soon found a dislike to [the new black cat] arising within me...I know not how or why it was--its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed”. The main character knows that the cat loves him, but he does not reciprocate the affection. The narrator can not come up with a reason for his mysterious behavior. Nevertheless, it may be a good idea for the narrator to stay away from the black feline. It is well known that black cats can be a sign of misfortune. The narrator may feel

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