the narrator argues that he killed the cat because of this spirit of perverseness, and how it encouraged him to do what he knew he should not, just because of man's natural inclination to do what we know goes against what is right. The narrator thus goes against his "best judgement" and chooses to "violate that which is Law" because of his perverseness, resulting in him finishing the job that he had started, and hanging his poor cat.

As the narrator is so thoroughly unreliable, we can't know for sure what his precise motivations are. But as his confession is taking place on the eve of execution, perhaps one could argue that he's trying to elicit sympathy for his plight. The narrator knows that he'll soon be dead, so he has limited time available to say the things he wants to say. He thus proceeds to give a very detailed account of how he came to kill not one but two cats, as well as his wife.

Though incredibly detailed, his account is nonetheless unreliable. At no point does the narrator take responsibility for his heinous crimes; he prefers to blame either the effects of alcohol or the malevolence of a cat. That he is being so dishonest right up until the end indicates a strong desire for control on the part of the narrator. He's not about to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That would be to concede too much. Instead, he'd much rather give a partial account of what happened, the better to remain in control of his life's narrative right until the bitter end.

The narrator of the story kills his first cat, Pluto, in a fit of rage. This first cat then seems to haunt the narrator from beyond the grave. The night after the cat’s death, the narrator’s house burns down. On the next day, he sees the figure of a gigantic cat, with a rope around its neck, impressed upon a surviving wall, “as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface.”

A little while later, the narrator begins to feel remorseful, and starts to search “among the vile haunts which (he) now frequent(s)” for a cat similar to the one he killed. The implication is that the narrator wants to find a new, replacement cat so that he can treat it better than he treated the first cat. In treating the second cat more kindly, the narrator perhaps hopes to ease his conscience, and temper the guilt he feels because of his cruel treatment of the first cat.

The narrator then happens upon a cat which looks remarkably like the first cat, except that the new cat has a large “splotch of white” covering its breast, whereas the first cat was entirely black. As the story continues the new cat seems to be a reincarnation of the first cat, come back to life to haunt and terrorize the narrator. The second cat (or rather the reincarnation of the first cat) drives the narrator to madness, and the madness consumes the narrator until he kills his wife by burying an axe in her head. At the end of the story, the narrator blames this second cat for “seduc(ing) (him) into murder” and thus “consign(ing) (him) to the hangman.” This is of course a fitting revenge for the reincarnation of the first cat that the narrator hanged from a tree.