The narrator as a psychopath in Edgar Allan Poe's "Black Cat" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik), course: Academic Writing, language: English, abstract: This paper will argue that the narrator in "Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe is a psychopath. Edgar Allen Poe is well-known for his short stories and his gothic style. He was born in 1809 in the USA and died in 1849. After studying languages at the University of Virginia he went to the army in the end of the 1820s and started to write short stories in the 1830s.

The narrator of "Black Cat" has been analyzed by different authors. Fisher, for instance, has the intention to figure out the motivation of Poe. His book analyses different short stories with diverse topics. For "Black Cat", he chooses a psychological view. This focus is close to the topic of that work. However, the analysis of Fisher is superficial, because he comes to the conclusion that the narrator is emotionally fragile, without giving a deep argumentation.

The most detailed work is given by Susan Amper and Harold Bloom. Different topics are analyzed; strategies for the interpretation of "Black Cat" were given and different approaches to understanding the narrator are mentioned. That means the story could be read supernatural, psychological or skeptical. Even so, the argumentation could be deeper. For this reason, the psychological analysis of the narrator with a psychological test could be seen as desideratum. Filling that gap, by analyzing him on a psychological way, is the main target of this work.