Discussion Topic

Descriptions and adjectives used for the second cat in Poe's "The Black Cat"

Summary:

The second cat in Poe's "The Black Cat" is described as eerily similar to the first cat, Pluto, but with a white patch on its chest. Adjectives used include "mysterious," "ominous," and "malevolent," reflecting the narrator's growing paranoia and fear. The cat's appearance and behavior contribute to the story's dark and unsettling atmosphere.

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What are the adjectives used in Poe's "The Black Cat"?

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," the narrator is highly descriptive in his accounts of the apparition of the black cat, using Gothic imagery, as well as supernatural, unnatural, and morbid motifs to build suspense and mystery.

Here's a sample, the last paragraph, with adjectives in bold:

Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!

The narrator is very observant, much like a scientist or a detective.  He not only gives color ("red") but numbers ("dozen," "one") to things.  Most people, given the horrific circumstances, are not so calm as to observe the minor details.  As Poe is a Romantic writer, he is not concerned with realism; rather, he wants to highlight the perverseness of the world more than comment on the true-to-life conditions in the natural one.

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How is the second cat described in Poe's "The Black Cat"?

When the narrator first meets the second black cat, he describes it by saying:

"It was a black cat - a very large one - fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, altogether indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast."

After he adopts the cat and comes to know it better, its resemblance to Pluto becomes more alarming. It is the same size as Pluto, and it's even missing an eye. Because of this likeness, he discovers that he is "disgusted" and "annoyed" by the cat's affection to him. Eventually, he says he feels "bitter hatred" toward it. Too ashamed of his treatment of Pluto to harm the cat, he flees from it whenever it comes near him. He wants to destroy it, but its one difference from Pluto makes him too afraid to do so: the new cat's white hair, which he previously thought of as an indefinite shape, now looks to be the shape of a gallows.

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